These projects will use the 2026 Scottish Parliament election as a key moment to drive impact, while continuing to organise, influence, and deliver change beyond the election period.
12 projects will share £2,275,868 in funding.
Our Programme Awards are designed to back work that is bold, innovative, and built to last - supporting projects with the potential to make a significant and sustained impact on the root causes of poverty and trauma in Scotland. This could include:
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Development and feasibility awards – work to develop good ideas with strong potential for change at scale, including work to build partnerships and participation to design and deliver good ideas.
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Test and demonstration awards – work to test and demonstrate new approaches to services and work that can reduce poverty and trauma in Scotland.
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Research focused on change - we are not a research funder but we will fund research where it can clearly and demonstrably connect to action to deliver change.
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Advocacy, policy, campaigning and influencing projects – to change policy, practice, attitudes and behaviours.
Unlike our rolling responsive funds, which run all-year round, we host time-limited open calls for our Programme Awards which will publicly invite applications around a particular focus. Meanwhile, through our discovery and relationship building work across the Trust, we also have the ability to co-develop potential projects with a strong likelihood of achieving big change that lasts.
A full list of the awards and aims can be viewed below.
Friends of Scottish Settlers: Migrant Rights
Campaigning/Influence
£210,000
What is the potential change this work could lead to? This community-led project will produce a joined-up strategy that Scotland’s migrant justice/support groups will mobilise around to influence long-term systems change on poverty and trauma. FOSS Falkirk and East Kilbride Integration Network (EKin) will work with Refugees for Justice, facilitator, and partner organisations to build inclusive forced-migrant leadership infrastructure that incorporates and resources communities beyond Glasgow.
Five key activity areas are:
- Rights-based media and narrative training / strategising
- Leadership and public speaking
- Network mobilisation
- Election-focused advocacy
- Education-based awareness
- Campaigning/coalition-building strategies
The project will centre refugees and migrants with lived experience of poverty and trauma, equipping and supporting them to lead systems change. We will map key points and pathways of local influence on strategic roadmaps that enable refugees and migrants to tangibly influence delivery, practice and public opinion on local and Scottish policy that affects their lives. The project will also build wider community coalitions to advocate for and build a better understanding of migrant and refugee communities experiencing poverty and trauma and who share the same geographical space.
- JustRight Scotland: Justice Beyond Apology
Campaigning/Influence
£80,000
What is the potential change this work could lead to? This project will support Scottish Gypsy Traveller direct victims of the “Tinker Experiment” to secure redress. Following decades of community activism, the Scottish Government recently issued an apology, which must be built upon to secure restitution for the harm caused and address ongoing harm. Through legal action, policy and communications support, and public legal education, we will support this pre-existing justice movement, working with trusted partners at Bobbin Mill, Pitlochry and the grassroots voluntary organisation Rajpot, supporting the community to secure redress while elevating and platforming their voices. This focused work will have broader impact in terms of challenging the deep structures of systemic racism, exclusion, and impoverishment affecting Scottish Gypsy Travellers more generally.
Scottish Refugee Council: Refugee Alliance Scotland
Campaigning/Influence
£73,153
What is the potential change this work could lead to? Refugee Alliance Scotland will be a national movement-building and systems-change initiative led by Scottish Refugee Council. The project will unite equality, housing, anti-poverty and human rights organisations to counter far-right narratives and address the structural causes of refugee poverty and trauma. Through three interconnected interventions: Movement Building, Narrative Change, and Policy Disruption, it will strengthen coordination across civil society, amplify refugee-led advocacy and reframe public understanding of migration and belonging. By aligning collective power with long-term policy and cultural change, Refugee Alliance Scotland aims to build a fairer, more resilient Scotland where everyone can live with dignity and inclusion.
Glasgow Disability Alliance: Small Steps to Big Leaps
Campaigning/Influence
£388,215
What is the potential change this work could lead to? Small Steps to Big Leaps is a proactive systems change project, bringing together disabled people and partners to address the root causes of disabled people’s poverty, inequality and trauma, challenge the status quo, and improve outcomes for disabled people, by:
- Strengthening and elevating the collective capacity of disabled people, Glasgow’s DPO Movement and GDA itself.
- Supporting public sector partners to engage in meaningful system change, creating safe space to enable honesty about the problems, to plan actions and share power.
- Building strategic relationships with aligned supporters including unexpected allies, to effect change
- Sharing data and lived experience to enable more effective policies, services and decisions affecting disabled people across Scotland.
Community Law Advice Network (Clan Childlaw): Challenging the Implementation Gap for Care Experienced Children
Campaigning/Influence
£81,252
What is the potential change this work could lead to? Clan will empower young people with experience of care, poverty and trauma to make lasting change through legal interventions that challenge systemic failure to alleviate the impact of poverty and trauma. We will use our legal expertise to interrogate how policy, law and practice comply with the implementation of UNCRC rights. We will scale up impact by collaborating within the Systems Change Fellowship and with external partners and experts from across the care and legal sectors to deliver a consistent message – Scotland must implement children and young people’s rights.
Families Outside: The Justice for All Collective
Test & Demonstration; Campaigning/ Influence
£240,142
What is the potential change this work could lead to? Achieving Fair Work for all by advancing values and worker-led public campaigns and building a movement in support of migrant workers in Scotland to influence change. This work will amplify the voices of migrant workers to influence the implementation of pledges made by the Scottish Government (including on Fair Work, housing, human rights and migrant integration). By building values and worker-led campaigns WSC will grow a broad social movement of support behind the implementation of policy commitments to tackle poverty and trauma for workers on tied and temporary visas in Scotland.
The Worker Support Centre: Fair Work for All
Campaigning/Influence
£240,142
What is the potential change this work could lead to? Achieving Fair Work for all by advancing values and worker-led public campaigns and building a movement in support of migrant workers in Scotland to influence change. This work will amplify the voices of migrant workers to influence the implementation of pledges made by the Scottish Government (including on Fair Work, housing, human rights and migrant integration). By building values and worker-led campaigns WSC will grow a broad social movement of support behind the implementation of policy commitments to tackle poverty and trauma for workers on tied and temporary visas in Scotland.
Edinburgh Food Project: Ending the need for Foodbanks in Edinburgh
Test & Demonstration; Campaigning/Influence
£175,172
What is the potential change this work could lead to? We believe that foodbank use should be rare and, when needed, short-term and always accompanied by wider advice and support.
The current Scottish Government has progressive policies to end the need for emergency food. But the implementation gap is significant.
Our project will create a movement for change among staff working in frontline services across the city and people experiencing poverty. It will demand real change, at scale. We want to close the gap between the government’s stated ambition and the lived experience of thousands of people who cannot afford to eat.
The Poverty Alliance: Building the Minimum Income Guarantee Movement
Campaigning/Influence
£80,000
What is the potential change this work could lead to? Laying the foundations for a Minimum Income Guarantee (MIG) Movement: expand and diversify support for the Minimum Income Guarantee, forging relationships with new allies within the third sector and strategic allies from beyond the third sector; build a long-term, systems change strategy for the movement using the Minimum Income Guarantee roadmap to identify key influencing priorities; and provide support to locally led campaigns aligned with long-term influencing strategy.
Children's Parliament: Growing Children's Activism
Test & Demonstration; Campaigning/ Influence
£250,000
What is the potential change this work could lead to? The proposal will develop demonstrate a replicable model of child activism in Glasgow, which can be scaled nationally to build a movement for change, in order to close the gap between children and power holders, and drive structural changes to children’s involvement in decision making and parliamentary processes on child poverty to deliver lasting change. This will contribute to a Scotland-wide movement of child activists from low-income backgrounds campaigning to address the causes and impact of child poverty, to meet the 2030 child poverty targets, in a way that improves children’s lives and focusses on the action and policy change they care about.
Shelter Scotland: Building Hope
Test & Demonstration; Campaigning/ Influence
£250,000
What is the potential change this work could lead to? Through our project ‘Building Hope: A Home for Every Child’, Shelter Scotland and Fife Gingerbread will work to end child homelessness in Scotland by influencing national policy and improving local authority practice. We will build broad support and political accountability to make sure that action is taken to reduce the number of children in temporary accommodation and ensure that where a stay in temporary accommodation is necessary, it meets the rights of our children to safe, happy and healthy childhoods.
One Parent Families Scotland: Transforming Higher Education Access for Single Parents
Feasibility/ Development; Test & Demonstration; Research; Campaign/ Influence
£250,000
What is the potential change this work could lead to? OPFS proposes a long-term systems change initiative to transform how single parents access, experience, and succeed in Higher Education (HE) in Scotland. Researching this issue with The Robertson Trust evidences structural barriers rooted in poverty, childcare gaps, and inflexible institutional systems.
This initiative will drive change through policy advocacy, coalition-building, and participatory redesign of HE pathways, ensuring they reflect the realities of single parents’ lives. By tackling entrenched inequalities, the project seeks to open new opportunities for single parents, enabling them to move beyond immediate survival, aspire to new futures, and fulfil their goals through meaningful access to education.