The Advancing Racial Justice (ARJ) Fund tackles systemic racism in Scotland by funding and supporting community groups, charities and CICs led by Black people and People of Colour (BPoC)
If you have any communication support needs that make reading this guidance difficult or impossible, please get in touch with us by emailing arj@therobertsontrust.org.uk or calling 0141 353 4321 to discuss alternative ways to find out about this fund.
To apply, you will need to fill out an application form, which you can find within our guidance.
If you prefer, you can submit a video or audio application instead. If you would like to do this, please look at the ‘how do I apply?’ section of the full guidance.
In the application form, you will need to describe:
You will also need to provide a budget outlining how you will use the £10,000 project development grant.
You do not need a full project plan to apply. Instead, your application needs to focus on a specific issue facing your community and how you would use the project development phase to plan your approach to tackling it.
This grant is designed to support you to achieve longer term strategic changes and it is not aimed at supporting you to deliver services and activities. We understand that racism keeps happening because of the way the system is set up. We want to change the way that the system is set up so that the same problems do not keep happening. This is why this fund is focused on changing the system itself, instead of responding to the problems the system creates.
You do not need to know how you can make a change in order to apply. This is what the project development phase is for – time for you to learn, reflect and figure out the most effective approach. Instead, you need to tell us what issue you would like to tackle with this funding.
Usually, this issue should be related to your current work and impacting your community. This might be in relation to employment, housing, education, health, or any other area of life.
During the action phase, you might end up running a campaign, or doing media reporting on the issue. You might create a project that shows how things could be if we lived in an anti-racist world – an alternative to the mainstream system. You might focus on building community power through building solidarity between different groups, or developing more community leaders. If you already have ideas, you can tell us in the application form but there is no expectation that you will have a project plan at this point.
You can see the questions that are asked in the application form below. If you look in the application form itself, there is more detailed guidance text to help you know how to answer each question.
If you have any questions about your ideas or the application process itself, please reach out to Martha on ARJ@therobertsontrust.org.uk or 07825 922 493.