Rules and eligibility

You can apply if your organisation is a:

• Voluntary or community organisation
• Registered charity
• Constituted group or club
• Not-for-profit company or Community Interest Company

We are unable to accept applications from:

• Statutory bodies
• Schools
• Individuals
• Sole traders
• Companies that can pay profits to directors, shareholders or members (including companies limited by shares)
• Organisations based outside the UK
• Organisations that don’t have at least two people on their board or committee who aren’t married, in a civil partnership, in a long-term relationship, living together at the same address, or related by blood
• One organisation applying on behalf of another

Cory can fund:

• Your organisation’s running costs
• Essential items and equipment
• Capital project costs
• One-off events
• Staff costs
• Training costs
• Volunteer expenses

We are unable to fund:

• Alcohol
• Contingency costs, loans, endowments or interest
• Profit-making/fundraising activities
• VAT you can reclaim
• Statutory activities
• Overseas travel
• Campaigning activities
• Religious activities (we can fund religious organisations if your project benefits the wider community and doesn’t include religious content)
• Political or lobbying activities

Cory’s employee Community Fund Committee review and score projects against a number of criteria, including whether the project goals are clearly outlined, whether the project is aligned with the application criteria and whether it has been clearly defined how the project will help the community.

We might get in touch to talk to you about your application before making our selection.

You will be informed via email and / or telephone whether your application has been successful.

All successful recipients will be asked to sign a funding agreement, which means the project will be delivered in accordance with the application as far as possible and will complete a project monitoring form on the project once the funding cycle is completed.

If you make small changes to your activities, or what you want to spend the money on, that’s okay, as long as you’re still using the funding to carry out the project you told us about in your application. However, you should contact us if:

• The main contact for your project changes
• You’ve finished the project and you have more than £1,000 of the Cory funding left over
• You want to make significant changes to the project or spend the money on very different things
• You can’t carry out the project or activities for any reason

If you are successful, we’ll require your organisation’s bank account details. When the funding arrives in your account, you can start spending it one the activities you told us about in your application.

Please keep records of the things you spend your funding on – and keep track of how it fits with your application. We want to make sure that the funding is being spent the way you said it would. Keeping bank statements can be a good record of what you’ve spent.

We may ask for updates on your activities and project. We may also ask to see copies of receipts, invoices or bank statements relating to your project for at least seven years.

If you’re successful in receiving a grant from the Cory Community Fund, we will publish details of your project and how we’ve supported it in our sustainability report, and may request photos from you. We may also ask that we feature your project in other materials, such as on our website, LinkedIn page, Twitter or our Annual Report.

We encourage you to share the good news too, and to keep telling everyone about the difference your project is making to your community. If you’d like to use our logo on your communications, you can get it touch with us.