THE CHARITIES AND CAUSES WE SUPPORT
Our charity’s objectives are widely drawn, but we tend to focus our grants on:
- The advancement of education;
- The advancement of the arts, culture, heritage or science; and
- The relief of those in need because of youth, age, ill-health, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantage;
- Charities with strong links to the City of London Livery movement; and
- Charities relating to current or former members of the Armed Services, including to units with which our Company has affiliations.
We make our grants to charities registered in England and Wales, and we have a preference for a majority of our grants being given to charities with a strong connection to London or to cities or regions with strong historic links to the tobacco trade. For that reason we also tend to prefer charities operating locally rather than nationally.
We do not generally make grants to:
- Causes related to a single cultural or religious group (other than City of London places of worship); or
- Individuals
Types of funding we provide
We prefer to make grants to charities where our support has a clear and significant difference, and where charities can demonstrate that impact to us. Sometimes that impact might be through a particular project or programme, or for other charities it might come through providing general support (including core funding) for the charity’s overall work.
Many of the charities we work with have benefited from our long-term support. We often provide funding for these ‘Charity Partners’ in three-year cycles, which helps those charities to plan.
We currently keen to increase the proportion of our giving allocated to provide one-off grants, perhaps of a few thousand pounds, for particular charitable projects or activities.
How to make an application
Please complete the application form in order to apply for a grant. We will use your completed form as the basis for considering your application, along with other information in the public domain that we might choose to access (eg report and accounts). We will check that your filings with the Charity Commission and Companies House are up to date.
When completed, please email a PDF of the form to the Secretary of the Benevolent Fund, Sandra Stocker (benevolentfund@tobaccolivery.org) together with any other supporting documents (see guidance on the first page of the application form).
PLEASE NOTE: Applications are now closed for 2024. The window for the next round of new applications will open between 1 March 2025 and 30 June 2025. New applications will come before the Trustees’ meeting in September 2025.