Apply for Funding
Funding alerts
as soon as they become available.
What WON'T be funded?
- Any work taking place outside of Barking & Dagenham.
- Any work which goes against the core values of Barking & Dagenham Giving (Collaboration, Inclusivity, and Sustainability) or our charitable purpose
- Any work which promotes specific political parties or are aimed at carrying out specifically religious activities.
- Activities already delivered, or normally covered by statutory services.
What checks do we carry out?
- Is the application about Barking & Dagenham? You would be surprised
- Have all the questions been answered fully? This does not need to mean it has to be a long answer – our shortest successful application was about 100 words long because the idea was fully expressed
- Have all the questions been answered clearly? While we won’t judge anyone’s spelling or grammar, our decision-makers do need to be able to understand what they are being asked to fund – ask someone you trust to read through your application beforehand.
- Does the project fit in with core values of the charity? These are Collaboration, Inclusivity, and Sustainability – we think these are broad enough to not be restrictive.
Why do we do this if we use community decision-makers?
Our experience with community-led funding over the last 18 months has taught us a lot. At the start, we let our decision-makers see every application that came in.
They found the experience to be very tiring and often frustrating, with applications that made no mention of the borough or used a lot of jargon without saying what they would do. The feedback from them was that expected us to do preliminary checks so that they don’t feel their time has been wasted.
Remember, even though they are paid for their time, it’s not their full-time job! We have to carefully manage their workload so that they can give applications the attention they deserve.
Past Funding Opportunities
Working together to strengthen Barking & Dagenham
Communities' Pot
This fund was delivered by BD Giving in partnership with LBBD council as a participatory grant process where local people stepped forward to work together to decide how the funding is allocated to community groups.
As part of it, we ran a public consultation, using the council’s Citizens Alliance Network (CAN) platform, which helped shape this fund. The outcome of this process was that the community wanted to see projects which address some or all of the following:
Supporting children, young people and their families
A specific need in the borough which you have identified and are able to address (i.e. not a general request for funds)
Testing out a new idea which might struggle to attract funding from somewhere else
The community decision-makers worked collaboratively using online tools to make their decisions, resulting in the distribution of £30,000 to local community groups as grants of £1,500.00.
Covid Relief
We offered 10 grants of £3,000 to support organisations that experienced a loss of income due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was not a fund for new ideas.
Instead, it was aimed at relieving the impact on smaller organisations that worked to support the borough, focussing on those with an annual income of less than £75,000 in their last published accounts.
The funding decisions were being made by a group of residents who used online tools to engage with each other.
Borough Innovation Fund
The Borough Innovation Fund is an initiative from the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and Clear Channel UK, in partnership with the charity Trees for Cities, and Barking and Dagenham Giving.
The Fund was created to improve and increase green spaces across the borough and give community groups and local people the chance to get involved in the design and creation of new green spaces in their neighbourhood.
The fund was publicly advertised in February 2020 and six groups responded with ideas. They were invited to present their projects and answer questions to a panel of assessors including representatives from Clear Channel, the Council, Trees for Cities, and East London Business Alliance.
Rapid Response Fund
The COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund was a £100,000 fund given to us by Lankelly Chase Foundation following the coronavirus lockdown.
We used a participatory process that involved around 30 people from across the community who designed and shaped the process and a further 15 people who stepped forward as decision-makers for the grants.
You can read more about how we went about this here, and read the stories of some of the people who were involved in the process on our Local Voices page.
We are in the process of evaluating this fund and we are excited to share this with you in early 2021.
Renew Fund
This fund comes from income generated by properties in the borough. Its purpose is to invest in ideas, and the people who generate them, in our community.
Before the pandemic, we were using this fund to test a relational model of funding. Applicants would bring us ideas they wanted to try out and we looked at how we could support them in bringing that vision to life. This involved solving problems together rather than insisting that an idea was fully formed and planned out before giving out funding.
Decision-making power still lay with the trustees but we were testing if we could slowly build a community of funding recipients who could then become part of the decision-making process.
In the wake of the pandemic, we continued to offer this support to ideas that were about tackling community needs caused by the lockdown.
