Appendix I: Covid relief and recovery funds

Government funding

Following campaigning by the voluntary sector, the Government made a number of funds available for charities and other organisations. These funds were largely administered by The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), although there were contributions from other Government departments.

Key parts of the funding included: - The £200m Coronavirus Community Support Fund - Match funding including the £85m Community Match Challenge and £35m raised during the Big Night In fundraising event - £360m from Government departments to support charities who have seen an additional need for services

Of the £750m announced, this report includes details of over £500m. The largest missing piece of data is up to £200m given to support hospices, for which data has not yet been released, while the remainder includes funds to devolved nations.

This funding does overlap with other funds where it was passed through other funders such as the National Emergencies Trust or devolved administrations. Where possible duplicate records have been removed from the dataset.

Culture Recovery Fund

The Government also made £1.57 billion available as part of the CRF to support cultural organisations that had to close their doors during the pandemic. Not all of this funding has yet been distributed and there are ongoing funds still open, as well as distribution through social investment and loans that are not reflected in the available data.

Around £873m of this funding is included in this report, of which £750m was distributed by Arts Council England and £123m by Historic England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Data is not available on funding made outside of England from these schemes.

Neither DCMS, Arts Council England nor the National Lottery Heritage Fund have made data on the CRF available using the 360Giving Data Standard. To include this data in the report, the data they have published has been transformed into the 360Giving format. In some cases this involved adding additional information that has not been published - such as charity and company numbers for organisations receiving the funding.

National Lottery funding

As well as being distributors for central Government funding, the National Lottery distributors did make grants using their existing funds.

Grants of £242m made by Sport England are included. This includes both Government-funded grant schemes (like the £100m COVID-19 National Leisure Recovery Fund for Local Authorities) and schemes funded from Sport England's existing resources.

The National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) was a distributor the the Government's Coronavirus Community Support Fund (£214m). In this report these funds are categorised under "DCMS Coronavirus Community Support Fund".

£128m of grants from NLCF's own funds are also included in this report. These include some Covid-specific funding streams, as well as grants from existing schemes like ‘Awards for All' that mention Covid.

Other National Lottery distributors, including those in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and Arts Council England do not yet publish data about their funding in the 360Giving Data Standard.

Devolved Governments

The devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland made their own Covid relief funds available, as well as organising the distribution of some funds from the UK Government.

In Scotland, the funds provided by the Scottish Government included:

Wellbeing Fund (£26m)
Third Sector Resilience Fund (£22m)
Communities Recovery Fund (£17m)
Supporting Communities Fund (£16m)
Adapt and Thrive Programme

These funds total £96m and data on them was published by SCVO.

In Wales, WCVA has published data on £27m of Covid recovery and resilience funding provided by the Welsh Government, as well as £1.8m of other funding.

No information on Government funding from the Northern Ireland Department for Communities has been included in this report. £16m was made available for charities and was distributed by the National Lottery Community Fund, but not included in published data.

National Emergencies Trust

The National Emergencies Trust (NET) was set up in 2019 to allow coordinated fundraising around domestic UK emergencies. The pandemic response was its first appeal.

NET has distributed around £94m in funding following its appeals, using money donated by companies, other charitable trusts, Government and the public. The funds were distributed to partner organisations and to UK Community Foundations for onward distribution to local charities.

Not all Community Foundations publish grants data, so not all NET funding is included in this report. Also, Community Foundations and other distributors often contributed their own funds as well as NET funds, so it is not possible to determine what proportion of NET funding is included in the report.

A further complication is that Community Foundations and NET also distributed some funding contributed by DCMS, so there is overlap with Government funding. Where possible, duplicate grants have been removed from the dataset.

This means that only a proportion of NET-distributed funding and Community Foundations' own grants are included within the data.

London Community Response

The London Community Response is a coordinated package of funding provided by funders working in London.

The 67 funders included have distributed around £57 million in funding. All of this funding is included in this report, either based on open grants data published by the funders themselves, or from data provided by London Funders, who administered the funds.

There were some overlaps with other funds: particularly from the London Community Foundation which included funds distributed from NET and DCMS.

Community Foundations

Community Foundations are grantmakers based in a defined area that provide a way for philanthropists and local people to raise money for local causes.

Community Foundations distributed their own funds as well as funding from partners like NET and DCMS. Because not every Community Foundations publishes data, where duplicate grants were detected the non-Community Foundation version was kept (e.g. DCMS grants were kept and duplicate Community Foundation grants removed). This means the report is likely to underestimate Community Foundation grantmaking.

Other funds

A large number of other funds were included in this report, where the funder has published data using the 360Giving Data Standard.

Grants were included where the grant title or description contained "Covid" or similar and was within the report timeframe. This means they may not reflect the full size of the grant programmes.

Some of the larger funders include: - Wellcome Trust (£68m) - Comic Relief (£67m - as a partner of NET and DCMS) - Garfield Weston Foundation (£55m) - BBC Children in Need (£25m) - Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (£20m) - City Bridge Trust (£17m - included within London Community Response) - Paul Hamlyn Foundation (£15m) - Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales (£13m) - Wolfson Foundation (£11m)

While the majority of funds included in this report are distributed within the UK, these funds may also include funding for activities outside the UK.

Other funds not included

Some funds could not be included as they had not openly published their grants data using the 360Giving Data Standard. We would encourage funders to share their grants data in this way, to help future collaboration and research.

Some notable funds not included in this report:

Barclays' COVID-19 Community Aid Package (£100m - distributed worldwide)
Arts Council England (£97.8m)
Julia and Hans Rausing Trust Charity Survival Fund (£18m)
Steve Morgan Foundation Covid-19 Emergency Fund (£5.7m)
Martin Lewis' Coronavirus Poverty Emergency Fund (£3.4m)

Amounts shown above are based on announcements made by the grantmakers.