Established since 1975, and are still supporting many of the same sorts of micro-scale community projects they helped back then. Their core goal is to help small groups of people who are getting together to make a difference in their communities. On the whole, they don’t support big or established charities. They are especially interested in helping groups that are starting up and need a little seed money to help them get going.
They are privately funded, so can take risks (and support unpopular causes) in ways that big charities and government bodies find hard to do. They are entirely run by volunteers, so our costs are low. They usually make VERY SMALL grants to VERY SMALL projects because they often find it hard to appeal to larger and more formal funding bodies. They give grants to projects where an initial £125 to £2,500 can make a real difference. In general, we look at what it is costing per-head to reach the people the project is helping.