What if funding could work better for everyone involved?
Of all the challenges I faced running a small local charity, securing the funding needed to sustain our work was by far the hardest.
Claire, Co Director of Fund Gloucestershire
A new funding infrastructure
We want to make it simple for the good work happening in Gloucestershire to get funding.
Fund Gloucestershire is a newly registered charity with a bold mission - to transform how funding flows to communities across Gloucestershire.
We understand how much time, energy and emotion Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) organisations and community groups put into finding and applying for funding. Most funders require broadly the same policies and documentation from applicants, who are often asked similar questions about their work in different formats, creating long and complex processes that can make funding slow to access.
Smaller organisations with limited resource are often affected the most. They often have the least capacity to search for funds, complete applications and repeatedly provide the same organisational information.
Unpredictable funding timelines, bespoke funding processes and changing criteria can all make operational planning difficult and prevent smaller organisations from taking a strategic approach to managing their service delivery.
My overriding observation, looking back over 45 years, is what a HUGE amount of money the process of asking for, and giving, funding requires and absorbs.
Sally, Co-Director of Fund Gloucestershire
Why funding matters to us
As Co-Directors of Fund Gloucestershire, Sally Byng and Claire Foote bring experience from both the Funder and Applicant perspective.
Sally’s career has included first-hand experience of both sides of funding. She spent years finding funds in academia to fund her research, then raised £2.5 million to set up a VCSE organisation. She moved over to the other side as CEO of a Charitable Trust, running it for 17 years, modernising its funding strategy and practices.
Claire has had a diverse career across senior roles in UK government and global defence. She pivoted to the VCSE sector in 2023 to lead Gloucester-based Wiggly Charity, where she tripled their impact and reach in two years. Her experience of applying for funding as a small charity CEO has shaped her commitment to making funding simpler and easier to access.
Together, Sally and Claire are motivated to improve the funding environment for applicants across Gloucestershire, helping funding flow more freely and working with funders to enable their funds to achieve the impact they want to see.
As Fund Gloucestershire grows, we hope to attract more funds into the county and reach more not-for-profit organisations with a range of funding opportunities that can be accessed simply and easily through a single platform.
Better funding together
United in a shared vision to simplify place-based funding processes, the team have worked in partnership with some great people across Gloucestershire and beyond to bring their vision to life.
At the heart of our mission, CAST and The Developers Society have designed and built our digital platform to create a more efficient, faster and fairer service for everyone involved.
As we have progressed, we have listened and learned from some of the leading change-makers in the VCSE and funding sector. We have consulted with Tom Steinberg and Gemma Bull - the epic team at Modern Grantmaking - and worked with Helen Schuwer and Leigh Felstead on communications and visual design. We have sought wise counsel on data from Tim Davies at Practical Participation and shared reflections on funding with Jo Jeffery, amazing fundraiser and creator of The List, the fantastic VCSE resource on UK grants. We are grateful for all their involvement, as well as for rich input from many other people in the sector, who have generously shared their insights on funding with us.
It was fun to work with the photography students at the University of Gloucestershire, who have provided many of our images, and we appreciate Hub8 Glos Col co-working space for supporting our small team to collaborate in person to make Fund Gloucestershire happen.
We will continue to expand our networks, reach out across the sector, and to listen and learn from everyone involved in the funding landscape.
