How to apply

Who is eligible for Charles Plater Trust support?

What funding support you can apply for from CPT depends on the size of your charity. Please consult the charity income document here.

Please also read our exclusion criteria below to ensure that your organisation is eligible for Charles Plater Trust support.
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Our exclusions - what we cannot support

Charities with an annual income above £10 million. The only exception to this if for Universities and HE Institutions, who irrespective of their size and annual income, can apply for both small or large grants from CPT, on condition that they must be partnering with a micro, small, medium or large charity in their project proposal to us to be eligible for our funding in a joint bid of this nature.

Projects that are outside our three priority themes - leadership for lay people; social action and/or applied research.
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Projects from organisations that are not registered charities or are not currently working towards establishing their charitable status.

Work that does not have a direct benefit in England or Wales or where the applicant organisation is not based in England or Wales.

Grants to individuals - we only provide support to registered charities not individuals. The only exception to this is that we will consider funding individual postgraduate scholarship projects in the applied research priority theme, providing that the applying academic organisation ensures that it holds an open competition to select a candidate to undertake the grant-funded research.
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Organisations without at least three non-executive trustees or directors.

Grants for over £60,000 in total.
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Capital costs: CPT will only fund revenue project costs, not capital costs. Revenue costs are the costs of making projects happen. They occur during the project, for that project. Capital costs are for items which last beyond the project and these cannot be funded by CPT and so should not be
included in project budgets.
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‍Organisational core costs: Core costs are the running costs of your organisation. This is the money you need to make the work happen. These are also sometimes called overheads, running costs or operating costs. Unfortunately, due to the demands on CPT's limited resources we do not now cover core costs/overheads in project grants, so please do not include these type of costs in your project budget to us.

Repeat funding: If your organisation has been successful in securing funds from us before, we will only accept another application from you if two years has elapsed from the date you last received a grant instalment from us.
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Multiple successful applications: Each successful applicant can only hold one grant from us at a given time.
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Please also note: 

The Trust will consider applications from organisations seeking to use a Plater Trust grant as match funding as part of a larger projects, but only if it contributes to an effective delivery of the Charles Plater Trust mission.
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Applications from a consortium of organisations will be given consideration if the project has a clearly listed chief contact from the lead organisation and fulfils all other eligibility criteria.

Theory of Change

While a few years ago, the term ‘theory of change’ was largely unknown in the UK voluntary sector, increasingly today charities are turning to it, to help them define what their goals are and to orient a charity’s activities to be more impact focused. Today, Plater Trust is keen to be as clear as possible about what change we want Plater Trust to achieve and how we think we are going to generate that change so that we can be more confident that all the activity we do at a day-to-day level is actually making a positive difference.