Every year since 2019 we have started the year with an empty bank account and then worked to raise the funds so we could open for applications and give the money out by the end of the year. Last year was a great year for fundraising, raising around £74,000 – three times more than the year before. Some of this was thanks to Headfirst who have been donating their booking fees to us. As a chunk of these funds came after the funding round we ended up with some funds leftover last year. We’re really grateful for this as there are so many groups needing support – in our last round we received 71 applications.

So far this year we’ve received £53,000 in donations. The table below shows what we have spent so far.

Round 7 grants	8,000.00
Members grants	6,080.00
Community Response Fund	150.00
Payments to groups for scoring etc	1,740.00
Venue hire for 2 meetings	250.37
Catering for 2 meetings	868.00
Facilitation for 2 meetings	500.00
Other expenses for meetings	13.33
Comms & outreach (leaflets, website, stalls etc)	53.85
Bank charges/ legal fees/ accountancy/ reg address	237.30
	17,892.85

We currently have around £65,000 in our bank account, with around £22,000 of that earmarked for members grants, a £500 R7 grant yet to be paid out and £1,800 for the Community Response Fund.

It has taken a lot of time to set up the membership over the last few months, especially as we are all volunteers and wanted to involve groups in every step of the process, but now that is done our focus will be back on distributing funds. Members are already coming up with ideas on how we can do this differently, there is always room for exploring something new!