Guidance on applying to the SafeDeposits Scotland Community Fund

The SafeDeposits Scotland Community Fund, launched in June last year, provides small funding grants of up to £2,000 to assist projects aimed at improving their local communities. Grants are awarded on a quarterly basis, after an application period. To date, we have completed three rounds of funding and have awarded grants to 19 projects across Scotland, supporting organisations in their goal to enrich local communities. Beneficiaries have included a wide variety of different projects, including workshops in technology skills, community events and youth team football kits to name just a few. The SafeDeposits Scotland Community Fund is completely separate to the SafeDeposits Scotland Charitable Trust.

The SafeDeposits Scotland Community Fund is now accepting applications for our next round of funding, which ends on 15th March, and for this particular funding round the maximum value of individual grants available has been increased to £5,000.

It can often be difficult to know where to begin with an application, and the purpose of this article is to provide some advice and direction on how to proceed with your SafeDeposits Scotland Community Fund application, as well as some dos and don'ts.

Grants awarded by the Fund should meet at least one of the following five criteria:

• Sustainability and the environment
• Employability and career skills
• Social inclusion
• Technology and digital inclusion
• Improving the local community

The first thing to bear in mind when writing your application is that we do receive a lot and can only give a limited amount of grants each quarter. This means that your application has to stand out among the rest. It should be detailed and clearly define what your project is, what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. The more information you provide, the better, as it will make it easier for us to understand exactly what the funding will be used for as well as its beneficiaries.

Applications where we do not have a clear understanding of the details of how the funding will be used do not tend to be successful. As a responsible organisation, it is important for us to understand the details and allocation of funds from our Community Fund. A breakdown of how the funding will be spent should be provided and should be as specific as possible. It also makes it much clearer if each of the costs are in an itemised list. For example, rather than simply stating that funds will be used for "equipment", list the items of equipment and how much each item costs. 

There are certain things which we cannot fund, and these can be found in the SafeDeposits Scotland Community Fund's rules and guidance document, as well as in our FAQs. The Community Fund will also only fund projects where our contribution is a meaningful one in relation to the overall project cost. As a rule of thumb, we typically do not award grants where our contribution is less than 30% of the total cost.

You can find more information about some of the projects we have previously supported here.