Welcome to The Dulverton Trust

The Dulverton Trust is an independent grant-making charity. We support UK charities with a national reach tackling a range of social issues, protecting the natural world, and preserving heritage crafts.

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Our Categories

Our largest category, supporting work with young people aged up to 25 that:

  • engages participants primarily on the basis of low income;
  • helps participants to develop the life skills (e.g., employability skills, academic skills, or social-emotional skills) to thrive, and;
  • takes a strengths-based approach. There is strong evidence that growing up in poverty can negatively impact a young person’s life chances. However, we want to fund charities which recognise the skills and capacity that young people already possess, and do not view the young person as something to be ‘fixed’. 

We support work in communities with high levels of poverty, focusing on strengthening and supporting family relationships; work with offenders, especially young offenders, with a focus on desistance; helping young homeless people to move forward; maintaining active living and independence for older people; the welfare of those who care for others; and the promotion of social cohesion.

We support the development of craftsmanship in the traditional techniques of repair and restoration and have a strong interest in: heritage skills training, particularly where it may benefit a disadvantaged group; and cathedrals (Trustees generally make one award to a cathedral per year).

We support charities working on the health and resilience of the UK’s wildlife habitat. This work focuses on protecting, planting and sympathetically managing trees and native woodlands; and protecting coastal and marine environments.

This category is currently restricted to UK registered charities operating in Kenya or Uganda, which already have a long association with the Trust. Our priorities in these locations are: community development (in particular, the provision of water and power, and the encouragement of farming, common market gardening and enterprise); and wildlife conservation. Funding is limited and we recommend that you contact us in advance of submitting an application.

Applications to this category are invitation only. The focus of the category is (a) the provision of facilities or expertise to organisations engaged in disaster preparedness, and (b)  peace intervention. See our FAQ for more information.

Applying for funding

We fund charities and CIOs with a national reach working within the above funding categories that meet our eligibility.

To apply, complete our eligibility quiz (button below). If eligible, you will be provided with a link to our online Expression of Interest form. You can download the questions we ask here.

We do not accept appeals via post or email, except as set out in our FAQ.

We receive many more applications than we can fund. For information on how we prioritise, what to expect from our assessment and timescales, please read our FAQ.

News and Blogs

Our June grants list: record core grants awarded!

24 Jun 2024

The list of grants awarded at our June panel is now live on our website – and we are delighted that the Trust awarded its highest ever proportion of core funding grants. Explore the Trust’s recent grants by clicking here…

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Binda Patel appointed as Director of the Trust

20 Jun 2024

The Trustees and staff of the Dulverton Trust are delighted to announce the appointment of Binda Patel as the Trust’s new Director. Binda joins from the Sutton Trust, a charity championing social mobility in the UK. She has dedicated over 15 years of her career to working with charities and held several trustee positions, including the Diana Award and Arts Emergency.

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Insights: Feedback. How we Get it and How we Use it.

3 May 2024

As in all organisations, a culture of continuous improvement is crucial to the sustained success of a grantmaking trust. But when you’re holding the purse strings, it can be hard for people to give you the critique you need to improve. Anna de Pulford, Director, shares how the Dulverton Trust addressed the problem of feedback in the grantmaking sector.

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The Dulverton Trust is committed to transparency and we publish details of grants made to the 360Giving data standard.

To search our recent grants, click here or click here to download an excel spreadsheet of grants awarded since 2012.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This means the data is freely accessible to anyone to be used and shared as they wish. The data must be attributed to The Dulverton Trust. To view a copy of this license, click here.