Grant Statistics

The present Trustees have been in place for more than 10 years – what have we achieved since we took over?

Broadly, we’ve supported ‘green care’ and countryside and horticultural education – see our Trust’s Aims webpage. You can learn who we have supported from our Grants Awarded webpage which contains all donations, is searchable and includes a map of our recipients’ locations. We have pretty much covered the UK.

 As we have become more widely known proposals have begun to pour in. It seems we have tapped an enormous charitable need. Competition for our funding is now considerable, is increasing and greatly exceeds our granting capacity, as the graphs on this webpage show.

For example, since April 2007, when the present Trustees restarted donations, we’ve received more than 1500 proposals totalling almost £14.6M. But to preserve our capital fund we’ve donated ‘only’ c.£3.98M so far, to roughly 600 separate UK enterprises.

Both the number and amount of donations requested have increasingly exceeded those we’ve granted (see Graph 1 below). In 2020-21 (including the impact of the pandemic) the proposal amount was diminished by 22% on the previous year but still numbered 338 totalling £2.2M. Nevertheless, we granted a record £605,000 (up 36% on 2019-20) to 135 applicants, in part because we decided to give £180,000 to the Covid-19 research effort of the Francis Crick Institute. Usefully, matching funds from Cancer Research UK grew this donation to £280,000. Our notional annual funding limit at present remains around £0.5M. 

Graph 1: the multiple of donations requested (number, blue bars and amount [£], red bars) compared with the numbers and amounts we agreed at our meetings. Prior to April 2011 grant requests were fewer so have been excluded for clarity. The total value of funding requested was £2.2M via 338 proposals, a multiple of 3.65 times the amount of grant-aid we actually disbursed in that year.

Nevertheless, we’ve maintained our giving at a steady rate, as Graph 2 shows. But even though the annual amount we donate has reached a plateau, applications continue to stream in and are rising exponentially (see Graph 3).

Graph 3: Annual donations granted since 2007-08 (left-hand scale) compared with the numbers of applications (right-hand scale). The hump in the red line reflects grant-aid that extended over several years; we reduced multi-year grants (hence the dip), even though we understand their importance to recipients, because we found they restricted the Trust’s giving ability. The exponential rise in application numbers is clear and striking.