Approval process

After you have agreed what the application process should look like, you need to decide…how you will decide! Smaller grants for example might be decided on by a subcommittee of the District Executive, whereas larger grants might require the full Executive to agree. If you're going to set up a subcommittee to handle all grant requests, the full Executive Committee will need to resolve to delegate this responsibility to the subcommittee and it should agree on clear terms of reference for the subcommittee. You should decide whether grant applications need to wait until the next scheduled meeting, or can an ad-hoc meeting be arranged when an application arrives?

How do you want to be kept up to date on how the funds are spent? This will depend on the size of the grant and what it is used for, but be clear at the outset on how you want to be updated by the Group and let them know.

How will you make the process sensitive, but transparent? We’ve mentioned previously about the importance of sensitivity when Groups talk to families about the financial support they might need, but the same principle also applies to Groups. Not every Group will feel comfortable asking for help, it is important that the process doesn’t make them feel worse!

Lastly, it's important to consider how you will deal with any complaints or appeals to your funding decisions. We hope they won’t happen, but it is important to prepare for them in case they do. It is important to lay out clearly what the appeals process will be before you award any grants, and how you ensure the process is fair, impartial and transparent.

As we said at the very beginning, decisions like what you are prepared to fund, what your criteria, guiding principles, timescales or limits are, how to apply, who to speak to and so on should be clearly available to your members, maybe through your website or regularly sent to your Groups.