Tag Archives: Grant Funding

The Cousin Contract: How Ignoring Conflict of Interest Kills Trust

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🛑 STOP Being Stupid: Week 7 of 40
The Cousin Contract: How Ignoring Conflict of Interest Kills Trust


Janice is a trustee. Her nephew Gary runs a landscaping firm. The charity needs its grounds maintained, Gary submits a quote, it comes in lowest, and Janice votes yes without a second thought.


Gary does a decent job. The price was right. Nobody loses money.


And yet Janice has just handed anyone who wants to damage the organisation a loaded gun.


I’ve had two CIC directors sit in front of me after funders clawed back grant money because of exactly this scenario. Neither of them had done anything wrong in the way they understood it. The connected party was cheaper. They were reliable. They were trusted. In a world where small organisations struggle to find suppliers who show up when they say they will, that matters. These directors were trying to do right by their organisation.

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Grant Funding in 2026. Let’s Not Sugarcoat It.

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There used to be a book.


An enormous green bible, published by the Directory of Social Change, called the Directory of Grant Making Trusts. If you were serious about finding funders in the early 2000s, you knew this book. You probably borrowed it from your local voluntary action organisation because buying your own copy was out of the question. It cost a fortune then. It still does. A new edition still lands every year, for anyone who can stomach the price.
You sat with it, worked through it, dog-eared pages. It was heavy. It was slow. And it was the single best starting point available.

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Your mate was wrong. And now you’ve got a problem.

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1–2 minutes

I get a version of this call regularly.

Someone has set up a CIC. They registered it a few months ago, sometimes longer, on the advice of a friend who’d done it themselves, or after watching a few videos online, or after buying a course that promised to have them funded inside two months. It seemed straightforward. It was cheap to set up. They were excited.

Now they’ve had a rejection. Or two. Or they’ve applied to three funders and heard nothing back from any of them and they’re starting to wonder.

They ring me, and I ask them to send me their registration documents, and within ten minutes I can usually see exactly what happened.

The wrong structure. A board that isn’t independent. A name that shares three words with the director’s private business. A community interest statement so vague it could describe any organisation doing anything anywhere. A financial arrangement that looks, from the outside, like a mechanism for moving public money into a private enterprise.

None of it was malicious. All of it was avoidable. And most of it cannot be fixed without significant time, legal advice, and in some cases starting over.

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Why Smart Charities Say No to Money (And Why You Should Too)

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The Charity That Said No to £200,000

1–2 minutes

Emma was halfway through her third coffee of the morning when the email pinged through. A major foundation. £200,000. Three years of funding. She read it twice, then immediately rang her chair of trustees.

“We’re not applying,” she said.

There was a long silence on the other end. Then: “Emma, are you alright? That’s two hundred grand.”

Let me tell you about Emma and Haven House—they’re not real, but their story is happening in charity offices across the UK right now, probably in one near you.

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Deep Dive: The Complete Guide to Grant Readiness — A Masterclass for Small Charities

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How one grassroots charity turned three years of rejections into £13,500 in eight months — and what your organisation can learn from it.

Sarah’s Frustration

Sarah is a dedicated trustee of Oakdale Community Sports Hub, a grassroots charity with a £250,000 annual turnover. She joined the board three years ago after volunteering as a coach for their youth football programme. While she works full-time as a primary school teacher, she dedicates her evenings and weekends to helping the Hub thrive.

Oakdale runs multiple community sports programmes from a modest facility they’ve gradually improved over their 12-year existence. They’ve created a vibrant space where local children and adults can access affordable sports activities. The sessions are packed, the testimonials are glowing, and the community impact is obvious to anyone who walks through the door.

But the organisation is perpetually caught in a financial balancing act.

(A quick note: Yes, Oakdale turns over £250k—but if your charity is working with £25k, £50k, or £100k, this guide is absolutely for you. In fact, it might be even MORE important for smaller organisations, because you’re often competing against larger, better-resourced charities for the same pots of money. Everything in this guide scales down perfectly. The principles don’t change whether you’re managing £25k or £250k—you just need fewer trustees and simpler systems. Don’t skip this thinking it’s not for you. It is.)

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