Difference between revisions of "Grants"

Revision as of 21:53, 6 February 2018

This page is mostly my note file, but anyone interested can join in the game of multiplayer notepad. The page is organised in order of likely timeframes.

Blocking Tasks

Management level problems

You must have a recognised governing document e.g. Constitution, Memorandum

Percolating. It doesn't need to be 1000% perfect as it can be amended via management commitee vote later.

You must be able to provide annual accounts for your organisation

Thankfully accountancy expenses are overheads too.

You must have a bank account in the organisation’s name which requires two signatories for all withdrawals (or spending). In addition, all signatories must be unrelated and live at different addresses

Name critera met. Dual authorisation is a pain, for online spending in particular. Some banks allow thresholds under which you can spend without needing to double auth it but I'm not sure whether the Lottery or Suffolk CF would allow that or what their threshold would be. I'll ask about lottery on Thursday. It may be worth having 4 signatories, eg the 3 directors and another management committee member, just to ensure reachability when a purchase has to be made. The non-director can't authorise anything on their own so there's no risk.

You must have a management committee with at least three members

Interestingly they don't specify Directors. One could argue the current setup already meets this criteria, but it's been on the cards to change for some time already. Realistically you'd want the directors as signatories so it makes sense to get them in line first.

Slightly less urgent

Roof quotes. Needed for information / sanity checks on what we need to do and spend, and showing research and best value to Lottery.

Extraction fan quotes. Needed because landlord is coughing up half the cash anyway, and frankly I've already hit this decade's asbestos quota.

Asset listing. I cannot begin to assess replacement / procurement priorities until I know what's actually ours. We need to have a solid proposal for the SCF grant soon!

Form proposal. As the above are completed I can start crunching numbers. These block the lottery application in particular, the SCF grant is for prior spending which proves itself.

Deadlines

The interesting Suffolk CF one needs to be underway soon as it's closing start of March! ALL of the above needs sorting before then if we want a free 10 grand! Ideally we need to be ready to apply by the 16th February latest.

Lottery has no hard deadline but ideally soon.

General

We do need to be careful not to crosslap grants, eg if two grants are ... granted, and both allow provision for roof overhaul, one or both may demand a refund of that part, whereas if one is for roof and the other 'maintenance', we then have money for the roof and say fixing the lift. The lottery in particular seem militant about this aspect! Once one grant has been approved and processed then the Wishlist will be updated and future applications use new source data.

In practice this means we need to be as nonspecific as we can get away with on any given grant application, to allow flexibility on what we spend it on. Especially problematic given that we have no idea when we'll hear back about any of these, and we can't stagger applications by up to three months, using the lottery timeframe as a basis.

Specific Major Items

We should get quotes for the roof, in terms of both free consultancy, and showing that we have done research & retrieved numbers. Some committees will prefer to tick a number next to a problem rather than think about material costs and whether we can do it ourselves.

The lift is a good example of this. It's probably not something we can repair, and getting a number to it would be a good idea, especially as that could be covered by a number of possible grants. However I have absolutely no idea who we'd approach for quotes on that? I'm sure the landlord would be more than happy for us to do/arrange the repairs for him if we could, but would he potentially contribute, as with the ventilation?

The Unspecific Grant

We are assuming it needs to take the form of an email with summarised budget headings. If they ask for more information or breakdowns then it's easily provideable, and at least then we'd know what they actually want from us. If someone PR minded could rewrite the summaries that would be helpful.

Workshop Tools and Equipment: £756.67

Essential tools to replace outdated or borrowed equipment with our own, and so forth.

Planer thicknesser and lathe forming vast majority (~£550) of total. Remainder vices, safety equipment, measuring tools, and suchlike.

Stretch Workshop T&E: £247.97

Very useful but not critical.

Offer up the cross vice and bobbin sander to the alter of corporate meddling? Lovely kit but we can survive without them for now. The other deferred items are duplicates (or close) to what I can lend.

Main Room Tools and Equipment: £525.60

Critical updates for the aged equipment at our soldering stations.

Costed from Rapid wishlist.

Stretch Main Room T&E: £83.80

Printer filament. Highly useful for creation of project enclosures and robot parts

Not much else we can 'stretch' for that's not critical. I do need 4mm MDF for the clock kit idea though, 3mm is too thin.

Maintainance and Improvement: £307.66

Wood for building shelves, double glazing for the workshop window.

Currently I'm assuming the perfectly costed Rafter Shelves (£221.74), and window double glazing (£85.92).

Stretch: Essential Materials: £79.58

Misc consumables such as nails, screws, etc

A chunk of the consumables section (shrapnel & components (£79.58), but exactly which of the consumables is irrelevant currently.

 Total without stretch: £1,589.79
 Stretch total: £411.35
 Total including stretch: £2,001.28

Can we think of anything better than 'main room' ? 'Main workroom' and 'wood workshop' maybe? Preferably something that sounds industrious.

I may swap the sacrificial cross vice with the additional bench vice, as frankly it would be very handy.

Other than that, ALL PIGS ARE FED AND READY TO FLY

The Lottery

'Need evidencing'

There is quite a lot of red tape devoted to outlining what 'Need' is being met, then how it manifests as a Problem which the Project then solves, and what metrics/statistics can back this up and demonstrate success. I personally find this sort of exercise very hard to get my head around, so input from others would be very useful here. To me it's self evident that if a roof leaks, it needs fixing; writing an essay on 'the social impact of not being wet' is meaningless. I think once all else is ready we need to have a brainstorming session to hash this out.

There are also requirements for community involvement, so demonstrating this is also essential, and for smaller projects they seem to accept variations on 'we spoke to our members'. Being what we are this is a paperwork exercise only, we should be able to demonstrate this easily enough. It seems a lot of the guidance doesn't differentiate between large and small projects, which is unhelpful to say the least, and we also have a limited word count to fit basically everything into.

https://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/funding/funding-guidance/applying-for-funding/identifying-need

About the process

Most of the really good lottery grants are Scotland specific, but Awards for All is UK wide and a viable option. Base success rate is 65% for applications under £5k, but considering their application volume and that our application is entirely within their stated goals, I have high hopes of success, so the issue becomes demonstrating that to their satisfaction in a small volume of words.

Apparently they use a point system internally. This page, while energy specific, shines light on their process near the end of the document; https://www.cse.org.uk/thesource/download/advice-on-making-an-application-for-a-community-based-energy-project-to-awards-for-all-340

More on what they look for: http://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/er_eval_explaining_the_difference.pdf

https://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/funding/programmes/national-lottery-awards-for-all-england#section-3

Useful reading on the process: https://knowhownonprofit.org/how-to/how-to--guide <-- very handy

https://bigblogscotland.org.uk/2017/11/28/success-rates-autumn-2017/ (Scotland seem a lot more open about their info)

https://bigblogscotland.org.uk/2017/10/23/applying-for-funding-the-ultimate-guide/ (Scotland again, but same principles apply)

https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2011/mar/21/perfect-funding-bids

Core tangible requirements for lottery funding: https://bigblogscotland.org.uk/2015/07/15/getting-your-group-ready-to-apply/

Intangibles are the problem. Mostly need to demonstrate need, emphasise the problems solved, community planning and involvement, and such.

If needed we can also demonstrate 'match funding' by using volunteer time, which we have in spades, and provision / procurement of articles.

We can also phone or email them for advice pre-application, since they're the experts, free advice! Email turnaround is 'up to ten days'. Phone might be better...

The initial funding application has 10 budget sections, which we should utilise as best we can. Exact figures show thought and calculation, so we want to avoid round numbers - this is one of their criteria; planning, not guesswork!

The Makerspace itself can be considered the project, which is something to aim for, as that would make all of our overheads incurred costs and then potentially payable.

Initial thoughts for categories:

Workshop Equipment
Tools and PPE
Electronics Equipment
Main Room Essentials (carpet, lighting)
Workshop Roof Materials (membrane, wood, insulation. could make this an umbrella and cover ventilation too?)

Less certain:

Dust Filtration (maybe air filtration?) There's a £3/400 unit on the wishlist that would work wonders.
Supplies and Consumables (whatever we can justify as 'house kit'. Core essential supplies seem well within their remit - eg 'stationery' is fine. We do not want to provide or house endless stockpiles, but core consumables are currently running directly from Steve's supply, which isn't ideal for anybody named Steve. The flexibility and negotiability of this is also a useful accountancy and commitee-wrangling feature)
Other Construction Materials (ply, wood. initial thoughts are for rafter shelves, but leaving it ambiguous is preferable)
Kitchen Equipment

In the future, the lottery Communities grants seem to be under applied for; look at the Scotland statistics on that, 100% success rate as a result! Our version of that is currently offline until April but it looks like we again meet core criteria. This one is £10K plus however, so probably not too useful until we need to annex naughty sheep. https://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/funding/programmes/reaching-communities-england - we should keep an eye on it, especially if we've been previously accepted for A4A as that would give us a major points boost.

Priorities

Italic numbers are almost completely invented.

Main room electronics bays - we should have two left to kit out fully. £5-600

Continuing the objectives of the previous grant, we need to expand the workshop capabilites. The first is on course for two bits of major hardware and some misc tools. We need to work out what core tools we need, and provide our own toolkit for this purpose. £100-250

Power tools - what balance of expansion versus replacement? £2,000

The workshop roof. £1,500-2,500

Ventilation fan(s) - we may need an intake too due to the gas heating. £500

Dust filtration unit £400

Oven fitting. If this is already completed then the cost cannot be reclaimed.

Lighting in the main room. Answers on a postcard please.

Overheads. £3,000 or as needed to fill numbers.

We could almost fill the grant with overhead costs, but then we wouldn't directly expand our abilities, and would have trouble making it look good on paper. A contribution to overhead costs would make us sustainable via member funding, and put us in the black with some 'excess' member funds. We could then spend those as needed rather than rely on donations of almost everything required to sustain us, from binbags to hoovers. There is a secondary consideration that if the grant exists purely as a cash lump sum for what are annual expenses, then suddenly we look highly solvent and less likely to recieve future grants, whereas if it is directly invested into assets and monthlies are paid from membership fees, that problem is avoided. Tl:dr; suits can't count, asset rich >>> cash rich

Current total: £8,000-£9,250

Lesser importance

Carpet £600

I'd like to earmark about £250 for small craft tools, eg scalpels, leatherworking kit, wire forming pliers, clay/wax sculpting tools, etc. Not a priority but it'll allow a range of less industrial craft, front-room friendly; currently we're Soldering and Sawing, Incorporated.

We can consider a major front-end bit of kit, eg a really nice 3d printer or a laser cutter. It would probably detract from the overhead payment part of the grant, but we should be on course for being self-sustaining from member dues after all this has gone through. Alternately we could wait until April and shoot for all this and overheads, under the 10K+ community grant category. Criteria are harsher, but success rates look higher as a result of diminished applications.

Misc Notes

1. Focus on how you’ll spend this grant (not just on your group’s history, or your current work) It’s useful to give a short summary of what your group does at the start of your application. However, most of the form should be used to discuss what you will actually spend this specific grant on! We get a lot of applications that don’t do this. Instead they give us extensive information on the organisation’s history and general activities. But we mostly need to know what you will spend the grant on, why you want to do this, and what impact this will have. 2. Tell us how you know the community wants this We also get a lot of applications for projects that sound great, but where it’s not clear if they are a priority for the local community or the people involved. The best applications provide a range evidence that the local community or users of the project have had their say, and evidence of how this has been used to develop the idea to meet their needs. Some groups tell us about focus groups they’ve run, community consultation events or surveys. But sometimes its as simple as telling us that you’ve had a chat about the project with the people who are likely to be involved or affected, and used their view and suggestions to develop your plans.

CAS etc

https://www.communityactionsuffolk.org.uk/support/your-organisation/funding/ We should see what this can offer (our area officer is Jayne). If someone chases this let me know, I'll get to it when I can otherwise. Update: I've emailed a general query. Awaiting response.

Suffolk CF

http://suffolkcf.org.uk/apply/grants/

Insert shortlist here.

http://suffolkcf.org.uk/grant-making-guidelines/ <-- we need dual signatories on withdrawals to get any of these

http://suffolkcf.org.uk/grants/fonnereau-road-health-foundation-fund/

http://suffolkcf.org.uk/grants/working-together-awards/ <-- this one pays retrospectively. If (as with the lottery) the Space itself is the 'project', suddenly everything including overheads is repayable - over the last year, that's nearly £10,000.

Others

https://www.fundingcentral.org.uk/default.aspx

Irrelevant

Menshed

Company formation date is more than 18 months ago, so we are inelegible. This is perhaps not actually a bad thing, I wasn't looking forwards to an endless obligation to Walmart's PR efforts.