Guidance

Community Covenant Grant Scheme: what you need to know (Archived)

Updated 1 September 2015

This guidance was withdrawn on 1 September 2015

The scheme has now closed and is superseded by the Covenant Fund from financial year 2015 to 2016.

0.1 The scheme has now closed and is superceded by the Covenant Fund from financial year 2015 to 2016.

The Community Covenant Grant Scheme was established to support the community covenant and to fund local projects that bring together the civilian and armed forces communities. £30 million, over 4 years, was set aside to establish the Community Covenant Grant Scheme.

We are now in the third year of this scheme and some £11 million has been allocated to projects supporting the armed forces and their local communities.

0.2 Administration of the grant scheme

The Community Covenant Grant Scheme is now administered on a regional basis and funds are distributed through a number of regional panels, chaired on a rotating basis by the Royal Navy, the British Army and the RAF. The community covenantand the accompanying grant scheme are all about local initiatives and the people best able to judge are those at a regional level.

This year (2013 to 2014) we have some £10 million to spend, whilst last year we only had £5 million. Delegating the allocation of the Community Covenant Grant Scheme to regional panels will allow this money to reach the areas which will benefit the most. The Armed Forces Covenant Team and the treasury will retain oversight of the process.

0.3 Applying for a covenant grant

There will now be 3 covenant grant scheme panels in each region in each year. These will generally sit in June, October and February.

Please check with your local partnership board when their own closing dates are for applications; these are set in order to allow the local partnership board to meet and discuss bids before being submitted to the regional grant panel for a decision.

If you are unsure about where to send your applications, please check using the details below for your area well before the closing date.

The closing dates for your local partnership board to pass their approved bids to the new regional panels are given below:

Panel	Submission date to regional panel
October 2014	19 September 2014
February 2015	16 January 2015

If you are interested in submitting a bid to the Community Covenant Grant Scheme, please see the ‘Community covenant grant terms and conditions and application form’. Please note that all information provided will be treated in confidence.

0.4 Regional contact details

The email addresses for your new regional community covenant grant administration teams are given below:

Region	Email address
Scotland	covenant-grantscheme-scotland@mod.uk
north east England	covenant-grantscheme-northeast@mod.uk
Yorkshire and Humberside	covenant-grantscheme-yorkshumber@mod.uk
north west England	covenant-grantscheme-northwest@mod.uk
west Midlands	covenant-grantscheme-westmids@mod.uk
east England	covenant-grantscheme-east@mod.uk
Wales	covenant-grantscheme-wales@mod.uk
south west England	covenant-grantscheme-southwest@mod.uk
south and south east	covenant-grantscheme-southandse@mod.uk
London	covenant-grantscheme-london@mod.uk

If you are unsure which region your organisation is located in please email your details to the one you believe to be correct and the administrators will confirm which regional panel you should apply to.

All bids must be signed off by members of the local armed forces community covenant partnership, so that the panels know the bid has been endorsed. We would expect the armed forces signatory to be a Captain (Royal Navy), Colonel (British Army), or Group Captain (Royal Air Force) where possible.

Once a bid has been received by the regional grant scheme panel you will receive a confirmation letter with a reference number for your bid. Please quote this number in any subsequent correspondence.

The grant scheme will consider applications for projects that deliver tangible results and meet the overall aims of the community covenant scheme. An application for funding can be submitted by any part of the community, this might include volunteer groups, charities, public bodies such as schools, and so on.

If you are interested in submitting a bid to the Community Covenant Grant Scheme please see the application form and guidelines available at Community Covenant Grant Scheme terms and conditions and application form.

0.5 Top tips

There are a number of easy steps that applicants to the Community Covenant Grant scheme can take to help ease the passage of their bid through the decision panel:

• ensure that your project has at least one of the aims of the Community Covenant at its heart
• all applications must be signed by Local Authority and Armed Forces partners; without these signatures the bid won’t go forward
• keep it simple: if anything is unclear or vague at best the panels will ask further questions (which delays the whole process) but at worst they will simply say no
• make it clear: while the overall aims of your project can be valuable to panel members you should also take care to exactly describe the steps you plan to achieve them
• provide a breakdown of costs, this not only helps to establish value for money (a vital factor in bids that are approved) but also gives panels enough information to provide partial funding
• panel members have a lot of applications to read through so please stick to the word count, the risk is that vital points may begin to be lost if too much information is provided
• the application template was designed so all the information the panel need to reach a decision should be there, lengthy annexes or additional pages will not generally be read, although some additional information can be useful but by exception, for example, maps or schematics
• ensure that the contact details of Local Authority representative and Project Leader are clear and complete to help us avoid unnecessary delays, please include telephone and e-mail addresses (where possible)

0.6 Some successful projects

• plans to replace the Scout and Guide headquarters in Bedale, North Yorkshire, with a new building that can be used by community groups with £159,000 of funding
• a play area for the Little Rascals Crèche in the Vale of Glamorgan received £32,888
• Tidworth Royals Football Club receives £28,000 to enable the club to provide new equipment as it moves to new grounds
• Calshot Activity Centre received £27,000 to provide highly subsidised places for service children on residential sailing and adventure weeks during school holidays
• a garden office for a community link project in Aldershot received £22,000
• proposals to run activity days at five armed forces bases in Oxfordshire received £15,000
• Ashcroft Arts Centre received £18,640 towards a film project involving local schools exploring the lives of servicemen and women
• £10,000 given to Royal Wootton Bassett for the town’s civic event to commemorate its new Royal status
• children in Gloucestershire will benefit from £9,880 to fund places on ‘Go Ape’ children’s assault courses, supported by the 1st Battalion The Rifles
• £7,000 given to the Swan Forces project in Wiltshire to develop services to prevent social exclusion among ex-service personnel and their families
• £6,000 provided to help Gurkhas in Eastleigh to learn English and integrate with the local community
• £1,000 provided to buy equipment in Mere, Wiltshire, to help clear snow from the homes of the elderly and disabled
• £800 will help to fund a scheme in Southampton to promote and support the armed forces among the Asian community in the town

To find out on the latest updates you can check out our quarterly community covenant e-newsletter or subscribe to our email alerts.

You can email the Armed Forces Covenant Team at: covenant-mailbox@mod.uk.