To:- Cytûn church leaders and offices; Property officers and equivalents; Laser Group; Covid 19 mailing list
Following extensive conversations between Cytûn and Welsh Government, we have today received from Welsh Government the encouraging news below regarding the availability of the Third Sector Resilience Fund for churches and faith groups. Note that there is only a fortnight before the closing date for expressions of interest (although there will be some more time to complete the full application). Because of the lack of time, Cytûn would recommend that consideration be given to submitting applications for groups of places of worship (such as a Circuit, Diocese or denomination, for example).
We are varying the eligibility requirements for Third Sector Resilience Fund (TSRF) phase 3 with immediate effect, relaxing in part the need for beneficiaries to be incorporated bodies. We recognise that certain organisations are specifically precluded from incorporating in their own right, something that is of particular relevance to certain faith communities. Therefore if a body is established by Royal Charter or similar decree at a national level, we will accept applications from related local faith groups, even though they themselves will never be an incorporated body.
They will though understandably need to meet all the other criteria of the fund, which for religious bodies means that funding can only be used to support ‘outreach’ type activities and not for what might be termed ‘worship’. Applicants will have to be able to demonstrate how existing costs split between these strands. Full details of the fund are on WCVA’s website https://wcva.cymru/funding/social-investment-cymru/third-sector-resilience-fund-for-wales/
TSRF is open to new Expressions of Interest until the end of January. If anybody has any queries or wants some guidance then the first step is to email WCVA on sic@wcva.cymru
On a wider front, there are ongoing discussions with the Grants Centre of Excellence on how we can extend this approach to other funding in the future. We’ll keep in touch on this as things develop.