Community Vehicle Grants guidance

Who and what are Community Vehicle Grants for?

• For registered charities working in Scotland, with an annual income of £25,000 to £2 million, that support people who are experiencing (or are at risk of experiencing) poverty or trauma
• Funding of £2,500 to £10,000 to part fund the costs of the purchase or upgrade of a vehicle used by your charity
• Due to upcoming changes to Our Funds, the last date to apply is 12 noon, Friday 31st May 2024.

Who can’t apply?

• Charities who received funding from us for a Community Vehicle within the past 12 months. If you wish to reapply for further Community Vehicle funding once your current grant ends, please call us first to discuss.
• Housing Associations and Arm’s Length External Organisations (ALEOs). These types of organisation are not currently eligible for funding from us. However, we are committed to reviewing our guidance and criteria across the course of our strategy. To be kept informed, please sign up to our mailing list.

What do I need to apply?

• A minimum of three unconnected Trustees on your charity’s Board. By unconnected we mean not related by blood; married to each other; in a relationship with each other or living together at the same address.
• Recent independently examined or audited annual accounts. If your organisation is a newly registered charity which has not yet produced accounts, we’ll ask you to send us details of an independent referee who knows your work well, a recent bank statement and a projection showing your organisation’s expected income for its first year.
• A safeguarding policy. If your organisation directly supports children and young people or vulnerable adults, we would expect you to have an appropriate policy document which sets out how you will keep them safe.

What type of work will you fund a vehicle for?

Through our Community Vehicle Grants, as with all our funding, we want to support charities whose work addresses the impacts of poverty and/or trauma under one or more of these themes - please click through for details

1. Financial Security: addressing the financial and material effects of poverty on people and communities. 

2. Emotional Wellbeing and Relationships: ensuring people have emotional wellbeing, and confidence and strength in their relationships with others.

3. Education Pathways: equipping people for the future through learning and skills pathways.

4. Work Pathways: improving employability services, and employability rates, for key population groups currently underrepresented in the labour market, and overrepresented in low paid, insecure, work.

Across all of these themes, we can contribute to the costs of a vehicle used to support work that:

• meets people’s immediate needs around poverty or trauma 
• provides earlier help which aims to prevent or reduce the likelihood of experiencing negative outcomes relating to poverty and/or trauma 
• tests new approaches or does more of what works 
• is universal (aimed at a wide group of people or an entire community) or targeted (focusing on a specific beneficiary group, e.g. young people), as long as it shows how it will meet the needs of people (at risk of) experiencing poverty or trauma. 

Groups of people affected by poverty and trauma: We would like to fund vehicles to support work aimed at specific groups of people who we know are more likely to experience poverty or trauma, although we will also consider work not specifically aimed at these groups.

Examples of funding requests we would consider:

We will only consider funding requests where it is clear how the vehicle will support your work in addressing poverty and/or trauma. Examples of the type of request we might consider include:

• A youth group or community hub in an area with deprivation, requiring a vehicle to transport people to and from its activities and on trips, and for shared use with other local groups.
• A foodbank requiring a vehicle for the collection and distribution of goods for a food parcel service and/or outreach.
• A new or used minibus for a community transport service operating in a rural or remote area in which there is a lack of affordable or accessible transport.

How much can I apply for?

Funding of between £2,500 and £10,000 for the purchase of a new or used vehicle, or the upgrade of an existing one – for example adapting a minibus to ensure it is wheelchair accessible.

We assess each application on its own merits, however, we use the following sliding scale as a starting point for calculating levels of awards:

• Costs of up to and including £10,000 →  grant of up to £2,500
• Costs of over £10,000 to £20,000 →  grant of up to £5,000
• Costs of over £20,000 to £40,000 →  grant of up to £7,500
• Costs of over £40,000 →   grant of up to £10,000

Whilst we use this sliding scale as a guide, the amount of funding we offer you will depend on how well your work fits with our funding themes. Our Community Vehicle Grants offer part-funding rather than funding in full, so you will need to source other funds to meet the total costs of your vehicle.

You can only hold one Community Vehicle Grant at any time and each covers a 12-month period.

If your organisation also needs revenue funding, you can apply separately for one of our revenue grants in addition to funding for a community vehicle. You can read more about our available funds here.

What will not be considered for funding?

• Applications for funding a vehicle if the work of your organisation does not address poverty or trauma through one or more of our three themes outlined above
• Applications for funding towards the revenue costs of community transport schemes, for example salary costs, volunteer drivers’ expenses, fuel costs or insurance/licenses
• Routine repair work for existing vehicles
• Work which takes place outside Scotland
• Vehicles to support projects and activities which incorporate the promotion of political or religious beliefs. This is because of the Trust’s commitment to support and enable equal access to activities, regardless of whether an individual accessing those activities is of a particular faith or none
• Any retrospective costs already incurred by the applicant organisation
• Any costs not incurred directly by the applicant organisation
• Vehicles to support the standalone provision of childcare (we may consider funding the costs of a vehicle to help deliver broader support for vulnerable families, where childcare may form part of this).

What do you look for in an application?

We consider a number of key criteria when assessing applications. As well as meeting the basic requirements and fit with our themes, as outlined above, we want organisations who apply for a Community Vehicle Grant to demonstrate how they:

• Focus on poverty and trauma: recognise the challenges people in their community are facing in their lives related to poverty and trauma, as well as how their organisation’s work will respond to this and support them.
• Focus on community: involve their community in the organisation, for example on the Board or through volunteering; and that they listen to their community and respond to their needs. By community, we mean either a geographic community or a community of interest.
• Plan to use the vehicle regularly: either themselves or through shared use with other local organisations.

Other criteria we consider include:

• The organisation’s financial position, including its sustainability and whether it has an immediate need for our funds
• How well the organisation is governed and, where appropriate, the safeguarding policies and arrangements it has in place.

More information about what we look for in an application and what’s important to us.

How do I apply?

Please complete the online application form.

With this, we also ask that you provide:

• Please provide a copy of your most recent independently examined or audited annual accounts
• You don’t need to provide quotes or estimates for the vehicle when you apply. However, if we award you funding, we’ll want to see evidence of the purchase or work to be undertaken before we release the funding.

You can download a copy of our application questions and help text here.

Due to upcoming changes to Our Funds, the last date to apply is 12 noon, Friday 31st May 2024. 

What happens next?

• We’ll email you to confirm we’ve got your application and when you can expect to receive a decision.
• We’ll aim to tell you the outcome of your application within 8-10 weeks. This is dependent on receiving any additional information we may ask for – delays in receiving this extra information could mean the decision takes longer. We're currently receiving increased numbers of applications across Our Funds. The Team is continuing to work hard to respond to requests and assess new applications within our published deadlines, but if there are any changes to this we'll notify applicants on an individual basis.
• We’ll send all correspondence about your application via email, so it’s important that the email addresses and contact details you provide in your application are correct. We’ll normally contact the person you’ve listed as the ‘application contact’ in the first instance, so it’s helpful if this person is available during the assessment period. Please let us know if there are any changes to the contact details provided.
• We’ll assign one of our Funding Officers to assess your application. They may get in touch with you during the assessment period and will be able to help you with any changes or updates you might need to make to your application.

If we award you funding:

1. If you have been awarded funding, we’ll email you to let you know. Before we can pay your funds, we’ll ask you to provide:

• A copy of a recent bank statement for your organisation’s account, from within the past three months
• A copy of a quote or purchase order for the vehicle
• Evidence that you have enough funds in place to go ahead with the purchase.

2. We’ll do our best to pay the funds to your organisation’s bank account within two weeks.

3. If we have awarded you less than £5,000, you don't need to send us a report at the end of your grant year. However, we would love to hear from you if there’s anything you do want to share with us. You can send us pictures, videos, quotes or anything else to funding@therobertsontrust.org.uk 

4. If we have awarded you £5,000 or more, we’ll ask that you send us a brief End of Grant Report telling us how the vehicle has helped support your work in addressing poverty/trauma.

5. Community Vehicle Grants cover a 12-month period. If you wish to reapply for further Community Vehicle funding once your current grant ends, please call us first to discuss.

If we don’t award you funding:

1. We’ll send you an email in which we’ll try our best to explain why we’ve not awarded you funding. We will also let you know in our email how soon you can re-apply. If the reason we haven’t awarded you funding is something we think you can address, you may be able to re-apply once you have been able to do so. We’ll explain this in the email.

2. If you would like to have a chat with us about our decision and whether – or how soon – you can re-apply, you can email us on funding@therobertsontrust.org.uk and your Funding Officer will get back to you within five working days.