We’ve tried to answer the most common questions people ask below. Please feel free to contact us should you still need help.
There is no fixed amount. We award ‘small’ grants – up to £1,000 – throughout the year. Applications for more than £1,000 are reviewed quarterly by the grants committee. The average grant amount is around £6,000 – but most grants are for around £2,000.
We mainly support capital projects and the purchase of equipment. We sometimes fund ‘start ups’. We very rarely contribute to general running costs or revenue funding.
No. We always expect to be one of a number of funders. In most cases we expect you to be carrying out your own fundraising activity and drawing on your reserves. The amount we give will depend on how well you are able to demonstrate benefit to communities close to places where Clarks employees, pensioners and their families live and work.
We give grants to not-for-profit organisations – for example – registered charities, CICs, schools, local councils – for community projects. We do not give grants to individuals. Your organisation should be based in Somerset, Plymouth, Barnstaple or Kendal – or be submitted by a members of Clarks staff from a retail store elsewhere in the UK.
Just complete the Application Form downloadable from this website and send it to [email protected]. If you are applying for more than £1,000 please also complete a 2 page Executive Summary to tell us more about your organisation, its work and your project.
No, but it is useful to tell us what your financial reserves are and how much of them you are committing to the project.
The grants committee meets in March, June, September and December each year. The cut off date for applications is the 15th of the month before the meeting (e.g. for the March meeting, the cut off date is 15 February). Small grants (less than £1,000) are awarded outside of the committee meetings, all year round.
Small grant applications (up to £1,000) are decided on very quickly; you will usually hear within a week of making your application. Grant awards decided at the quarterly committee meetings are usually communicated within a week of the meeting date.
Your offer email will tell you how to claim the grant. Usually, we ask you to send us something like a paid invoice that shows that your project has been completed together with your bank details. The bank details need to be sent in hard copy through the post as part of our fraud prevention measures. All grants are paid by BACS where possible.
Although we retain the right to impose conditions on a case-by-case basis, in general the conditions are that you complete your project within 12 months of the date of your application (6 months for grants under £1,000) and that you complete the full project as described in your application. If the grant is for a large sum (£25,000 or greater) we may also ask you to sign a ‘pay back’ clause, undertaking to return the grant to us if the building or asset that the grant has been used on is disposed of or no longer available for community use. We also ask that the grant is kept confidential; if you do want to share the news of a grant offer, please refer to us as ‘a local charitable trust’ rather than by name.
We understand that things can change as projects develop. If you have a material change in your project delivery schedule, we may grant an extension if there’s an understandable reason for the delay and a clear way forwards. We will not increase our grant offer if your project costs rise, unless there are exceptional circumstances. If you reduce the scope of your project due to funding constraints, we may reduce the amount of our offer. If you have a significant change, please let us know. The decision of the Trust Manager is final.
We ask people to leave at least two years between applications and not to come back to us every other year for similar funding.
Most of our grants go to projects based in and around towns and villages where there used to be Clarks factories. This includes Street, Shepton Mallet, Weston-Super-Mare, Bridgwater, Yeovil, Minehead, Bath, Radstock, Midsomer Norton, Warminster, Castle Cary, Ilminster, Plymouth, Barnstaple and Kendal. We also like to know if anyone delivering the project, or likely to benefit from it, is a current or former Clarks employee. If you are not benefitting people based close to the places listed and have no link to current or former Clarks employees, please do not apply. Clarks employees based in retail units anywhere in the UK may apply for small grants for community organisations that they have a connection with.