We come to the end of another excellent year for the Veterans’ Foundation, during which time we have been able to award grants of over £5 million.
Since the VF's inception in 2016, we have provided around £18 million in grants to help members of the Armed Forces' community who are in need.
Those grants have been spread over more than 420 unique organisations that are helping people with a variety of needs such as mental health challenges, severe physical injury, homelessness, poverty, and so on.
In our latest round of grant giving, we awarded 50 grants amounting to over £1.3 million. Recipients’ activities ranged from helping war widows to those suffering mental health challenges, from easing the pressures on veterans’ carers to helping homeless veterans, from trying to recover from addictions to improving veterans’ wellbeing.
The activities of the grantees are wide-ranging and they are all helping our community and particularly those in need.
Our 2022-2023 Impact Report, which is about to be published, will show you a lot more about the charities and other organisations that we have helped - keep an eye out on this page of our website, where you can also see previous years' Impact Reports:
We have recently made some significant changes to our grants' programme, which should make the grants even more relevant and useful.
Major Grants of between £100,000 and £200,000 will now be awarded, alongside increasing salary grants to cover three years in some cases, and we will also be offering Minor Grants, of up to £5,000, developed specifically to help small organisations.
We believe that these changes will allow organisations to make a significant and positive difference to the support they can offer to their beneficiaries.
The Minor Grants, for instance, will enable small community organisations that are helping veterans and their dependants. Minor Grants will have less process and qualifying requirements to them, albeit the money must be well-spent on good causes; we see these grants being useful to drop-in centres and breakfast clubs, among others.
Our Grants Management System has also been improved with the help of Salesforce, so the pathway for grant applications and award will be smoother for staff and applicants.
We look forward to receiving applications once the changes have been made through the website in the New Year, and to hearing about the benefit these variety of grants can bring.
We expect to pass the £20 million mark for grants awarded early next year, which is a hugely significant milestone for the Veterans' Foundation.
Not only that, we will also be making exciting changes to the prizes in the Veterans’ Lottery; there will be more prizes and the top prizes will increase too.
I would like to express huge thanks to all our Veterans’ Lottery subscribers and Veterans’ Foundation donors and can reassure you that we do our utmost to make sure the Veterans’ Foundation income goes to the most worthwhile causes, maximising the impact of your support. Please continue supporting us.
Also, I thank the grantees, those organisations that are directly helping the Armed Forces’ community, for their invaluable service.
Finally, I wish you all a Happy Christmas and a good holiday, or some other festivity. Our thoughts will also be with those less fortunate than ourselves.
