Application guidance for groups
Question Purpose Example answer
Briefly describe your organisation, your community fridge and the main activities of your group?
This question tells us about what your group does already. This will be used to give context to your other answers and it gives the reviewer insight in to your current situation.
“Our organisation is a non-profit dedicated to promoting sustainability and social welfare. Our community fridge is a key initiative that redistributes surplus food from local businesses to reduce waste and support those in need. Main activities include collecting and redistributing food, conducting educational workshops on food preservation and sustainability, organizing community events, running a volunteer program, and partnering with local groups. These efforts aim to foster community engagement, reduce food waste, and alleviate food insecurity.”
Describe how receiving funding for this will help your group keep going?
This question wants to know how the funding will help your group to be selfsufficient and to achieve your long-term goals. We want to hear about what your group needs to last for a long time into the future and how getting this funding will make that happen.
“We are currently struggling because none of our volunteers have time to focus on fundraising. We would like to use the £5k to pay for a part time fundraiser for half a day a week.”
“Our volunteers spend a lot of time breaking up cardboard and it means we don’t have as much time to collect food. We would like to buy a cardboard bailing machine to halve the time we spend doing this allowing us to collect more food.”
How did you decide that this is what your group and community needs?
This question is asking you about whether you have done the research to find out if the plans you have are appropriate for your group and if they are the right solution for the problem.
“This is something that our team and our volunteers have been asking for, for a long time. We raised this issue in our monthly neighbourhood meeting and asked for feedback and input from the group and our community. This was the solution that we all agreed on.”
Application guidance for groups
Question Purpose Example answer
What resources will you need to make this project happen? Are the outcomes that you’re hoping for doable and realistic?
Here we are asking how feasible your idea is. What would you need to make your plans happen, who would need to be involved and how much time would they have to give? Would you need any specific resources that you don’t already have? When you consider what resources you'd need to be successful does the project still seem achievable?
“We would need an initial outlay of staff time to recruit for this position and extra time from staff and volunteers to train a new recruit. We would need some specific software to manage our volunteers more easily and we would need to cover some travel expenses.”
How and what would you measure to show what the funding has achieved? What would demonstrate whether your project had been a success?
This question wants to know how you would tell whether your project had been improved by this investment. What would you look out for to know that it was having an impact? We want to know about specific milestones and how you would tell at these points in time whether you were achieving what you wanted to.
“We do a regular volunteer survey, we would look to see if our volunteers were reporting feeling happier or less stressed as a result of this. We would run this survey every six months and if we didn’t notice a change after six months we would look to review what we had done so far and make a plan for the remaining six months based on what we had learned so far.”
Give a brief breakdown of how you would spend the funding over a 1 year period?
This question wants you to show that you’ve thought about a breakdown of how you’ll spend the funding. It will also help to give more information on what you want the funding for.
“We will use the £5,000 funding for one year to hire a volunteer manager for five hrs p/week.
Living wage: £11.95 p/hr
5 x £11.95 = £59.75
£59.75 x 52 = £3107.00
A third of the funding (£1667) would go towards core costs for our organisation. The remaining £226 will go towards a subscription to volunteer management software – link here.”
