Managing your Large Grant

Your grant agreement sets out monitoring dates, the purpose and value of the grant, and the limitations on grant usage. If you have any questions or anything is unclear, please do not hesitate to speak to your Grants Manager. The information below sets out information for holders of Large Grants only.

Holloway Neighbourhood Group

Payments

The grant will be paid in six-monthly intervals. The first payment is usually made on receipt of the signed grant agreement, ahead of the project start date. If this is your first grant from Cloudesley, we will also need to receive a bank statement. Subsequent payments are made on satisfactory completion of either the six-month monitoring visit or annual monitoring report. The specific payment schedule, outlining the timing of your grant payments and the requirements for release of payment can be found in your grant agreement. Payments are made via BACS.

Monitoring

Monitoring takes the form of one visit per year and an annual online monitoring form.

Six-month monitoring visit

Shortly before the six month point of each funded year, your Grants Manager will contact you to arrange a visit. The visit will be an opportunity for us to discuss the project and understand how things are going. The completed visit will trigger the next grant payment. At the visit, we will cover:

  1. The progress made in delivering project activities;
  2. Any proposed changes to the project activities;
  3. If there have been any safeguarding incidents
  4. Any opportunities or challenges affecting the project
  5. How things are going at the organisation more widely

Although we will cover certain topics and take notes for our records, we aim to keep these meetings relatively informal. We do not expect you to do lots of preparation for the meeting.

Annual monitoring report

The annual monitoring report should be submitted using an online form. You will be sent a personalised link for each report – please ask us to send it if you haven’t received it. A list of the questions can be found here: Annual monitoring questions.

How does Cloudesley use the monitoring?

The monitoring visits and reports help to keep us updated on your progress with the project and the grant spend. It helps us to identify any problems which we might be able to support you with, or any changes that might need to be made to the grant purpose or duration. We encourage you to be open with us about things that don’t go right as we understand that projects often don’t go as planned, and some adjustments might be required. Monitoring reports are always read thoroughly by the Grants Managers who then summarise the monitoring for Cloudesley’s Trustees. Collating monitoring from all our funded organisations helps us identify trends and patterns in the sector that can then inform our future work.

The demographic data we request helps us to understand whether we are reaching all parts of the Islington community that are eligible for our grants. This information is used to assess our grant programmes and inform future strategy. It is not used to form a judgement on an individual organisation, as we expect that different organisations will be reaching different parts of the Islington community. If you have any issues with collecting this data, please do let us know and we can discuss options.

Making changes to your funded project

You must let your Grants Manager know of any planned changes to your budget, project activities or circumstances of the organisation’s work prior to the changes being implemented. Your Manager will then be able to advise whether the changes will need formal approval from the charity’s Director or Board.

Grant usage

  1. The Grant must only be utilised for the purpose and according to the budget set out in your application and specified in your grant agreement. If you need to make changes, please get in touch with your Grants Manager.
  2. Beneficiaries must be resident in Islington (apart from the homeless or destitute asylum seekers who can be treated as resident if they are accessing local services in Islington) or classified as Islington residents, in receipt of Local Housing Allowance from the Borough, but not currently housed in Islington
  3. The Grant award for each year should be spent within that twelve-month period unless otherwise agreed.
  4. You must promptly repay any money incorrectly paid to you as a result of an administrative error or otherwise.
  5. In the case of any unspent grant, you should contact the Charity within six weeks of the end of the grant period to discuss this.

Grant acknowledgement

Your grant from Cloudesley should be acknowledged in your annual accounts in the year in which the grant offer is made and each financial year in which part of the funding is received. 

Cloudesley should be referred to in published materials or any broadcasts in relation to the funded work/project. Where appropriate, we would like you to use Cloudesley’s logo on relevant printed and digital materials. A guide to use of the logo can be downloaded below. For copies of the logo or if you have any queries, please contact us.

Logo guidelines

Contact us

Additional support

As part of our Flexible Fund, we can offer additional support to our funded organisations to help enhance impact and achieve sustainability. Cloudesley will work with you to identify any needs and agree appropriate support. This may be training, monitoring tools, or a bespoke consultancy package. If you think this is something you could benefit from, get in touch with your Grants Manager.