Organisational Development Fund

An Organisational Development grant provides an opportunity to do things differently. With it you can create new ways of working, develop organisational infrastructure and work on collaboration ‒ the things that aren’t front line delivery. Grants will support funded groups to strengthen their resilience and sustainability through improving capability/capacity.  It funds groups to make a strategic ‘step change’ in their structure, systems or ways of working to enable them to become more stable and effective in addressing local people’s needs.

The fund is NOT for project delivery but for organisational improvements that build long-term capacity to your organisation.

Please check your organisational eligibility to Two Ridings before considering the full guidelines. Note – our CIC, Company and CBS eligibility criteria was updated in November 2025.

Fund priorities

The fund focuses on organisations addressing local need in at least one of the following priority areas:

• Tackling poverty
• Improving health and wellbeing
• Reducing inequalities
• Reduced isolation
• Improving community integration and cohesion
• Improving work opportunities and creating economic growth

Applicants need to demonstrate how the funding will sustain at least one of the following beyond the grant period:

• Improving organisational capacity and capability
• Supporting stability through better governance, leadership, and/or financial resilience
• Enabling collaboration and partnership working to tackle local challenges

What grants can be used for

Examples of what the fund can support include:

• Business planning and development (including income diversification strategies)
• Governance improvements (e.g. leadership training, trustee training)
• Developing monitoring and learning systems to measure impact
• Fundraising strategy development (excluding commission-based fundraising work)
• Marketing and communications to strengthen visibility and engagement
• Piloting new approaches that could create new revenue streams
• Software and tools to improve organisational efficiency
• Exploring collaborative models (e.g. shared services, joint bids, partnership agreements)

We can support a Full Cost Recovery contribution towards core overhead costs (rent/ heating/ lighting etc) as part of your application. However, we cannot accept applications where overhead costs are a large proportion of the requested amount.

The fund will NOT support the following:

• Project delivery/activity costs: We understand that staff and project delivery are important but that is not the focus of this fund. By project we mean activities such as lunch clubs, youth sessions, educational classes etc.

• Capital costs: Small capital items can form part of the budget but should not make up more than 20% of the amount applied for. Note – we count these as non-consumable items that would have a life beyond the end of your project (e.g. laptops, tools, furniture etc).