• Initial contact may be by email or by post.
• If we consider an organisation expressing interest may potentially be eligible for grant we will invite a Letter of introduction
• The Letter of Introduction will be assessed and could result in invitation to complete the full Grant Application form.

Some helpful tips on completing the form are listed below:

• The main and senior contacts should be different people and the senior contact must be in an appropriate position as outlined and both must be over 18 years old.
• The date of birth must be completed for all contacts to allow us to complete our standard fraud prevention checks.
• Home addresses must be provided for all contacts, including those provided for schools and statutory organisations.
• Each contact must provide a landline telephone number.
• Year-end accounts should be fully completed. If you are a new organisation which has been running for less than 15 months, you should provide a projection of your income and expenditure and include the amount you are requesting from us.
• The Project costs should be completed in full, including totals and the amount you are requesting from us.

We will aim to have a decision to you within eight weeks of receiving a complete application.  We may require further information/clarification from you whilst assessing your application.

Remember you must not start your project until we have received, checked and approved the information you send us and you have received a conditional offer letter from us confirming the grant.

During our assessment we will look at the following factors to help us reach a decision:

• The need for your project
• Who will benefit
• How you achieve our outcomes
• If we have funded you before
• Your organisation’s income
• The total project cost

At times we find we do not have enough funds to support all the applications we would like to.  When this happens we need to make some difficult decisions.  We have a scoring system which helps us do this.  More points are given to applications that:

• Show strong evidence of need
• Seek to involve as wide a range of people as possible
• Meet more of our outcomes
• Are from organisations with a smaller annual income
• Are for smaller projects

We aim to assess each application equally and fairly and our team meets regularly to discuss their assessments.  The Trustees approve the final decisions.

What happens if we offer you a grant?

If we offer you a grant we need you to confirm what you told us in your application before we will pay the grant to you.  This means that our grant offer is conditional on you returning our offer letter which must be signed by the senior or legally responsible contact named in your application form, accepting our terms and conditions of grant and sending us documents that allow us to check how your organisation is run.

You cannot start your project until we have received, checked and approved the signed offer letter and any other additional documents we may ask for.

Confirming our grant

If everything you send us meets our requirements we will confirm to you when we will pay the grant.  You can then start your project.

Withdrawing our offer

If what you send is unsatisfactory we will contact you if we think you may be able to resolve the problem.  If there is a major problem or something that cannot be resolved, we will withdraw our conditional grant offer and write to you telling you the reasons why.  You can send us a new application, but before you do, you must address the reason why we withdrew our grant offer.  We will assess any new application on its merits, in competition with others, so it may not be successful.

Monitoring your grant

If we fund your project you may be subject to you completing either monthly or quarterly reports on progress, as detailed in the conditional offer letter.  You will also need to complete an End of Grant Report to confirm how the grant has been spent and what you achieved.  Please make sure that you get receipts for all the items or services you buy with the grant and that you keep them somewhere safe as we may ask you to provide them.  We may also visit you to check how the grant has been spent.

Please keep us up-to-date if your project or any of your contact details change at any stage of your grant.

Applying again

Once you have spent your grant (and we have approved your End of Grant Report if we have asked you to complete one), you can apply again.

If you have already received funding from The Sunrise Foundation and are unsure whether you can apply again or how much you can apply for; please contact us to check before you apply.  If we have asked you to send us monitoring information we will check this and confirm to you that your grant has been closed before you may apply again.