Guest blog from Jo Jeffery, Trusts Specialist
Jo spent her early career in local government strategy and policy and moved to the charitable sector after her eldest child was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. She has a decade of trust and foundation fundraising experience in the UK with a special interest in children, families and health.
Over two years ago,Jo Jeffery shared a simple spreadsheet that she had set up to log changes to grant-making. Now a website, The List captures – in one place – the pausing, spend-down and re structuring of charitable trusts and foundations in the UK. It aims to inform and empower fundraisers with timely and open access to information. Moreover, it is produced by fundraisers for fundraisers.
Jo shares her observations on this year with us adding what fundraisers can do to navigate this difficult landscape.
The change is changing
This year to date, the pattern emerging on The List appears to be shifting. Rather than the high-profile restructures and outright application pauses that dominated recent years, we are seeing more funders operate through shorter application windows, early closures, tighter eligibility criteria and longer—or repeated—periods of withdrawal.
It would be impossible to write about changes to the funding landscape this year without talking about The National Lottery Community Fund. The scale and pace of change in its priorities over the past couple of years have presented a growing challenge and risk. Since 2024, The List has recorded over 35 changes to National Lottery programmes, making it the most frequently featured funder. This year, The National Lottery again revised the criteria for Reaching Communities England: applications are now limited to projects operating within a single English region. The Fund said that national and multi-region work was a less strategic fit. Reaching Communities has long been a stalwart of the sector’s funding infrastructure but the changes close one of the sector’s most familiar routes to substantial funding for some. This picture is further complicated by anecdotal reports this autumn that Awards for All England may be prioritising smaller organisations. Although the published eligibility criteria have not changed, some applicants with annual incomes below £250,000 have reported being unsuccessful.
Halt, who goes there?
Early closure is not always a one-off administrative issue.The Sir Halley Stewart Trust is a useful example. Its published guidance makes clear that trustee meetings can close to new applications without prior warning once capacity is reached. It has repeatedly operated on that basis, and reported rounds have closed substantially ahead of the stated deadline. The Trust’s approach is understandable: a small grant-making team and trustees can only assess a finite number of proposals but for fundraisers it is about recognising what the behaviour tells us and whilst it may still be a good prospect, it requires us to change the way we approach certain funders.
The same is true of shorter deadlines. A narrow application window can favour organisations with dedicated bid-writing capacity, ready-made cases for support, current budgets and up-to-date monitoring data. Smaller organisations, volunteer-led groups and teams responding to immediate demand can be disadvantaged—not because their work is less valuable, but because they have less spare capacity to move at speed.
Recent examples show how this plays out in practice. The King Charles III Charitable Fund’s August 2026 small-grants round opened at 9am on 5th August and closed at noon on 19th August: effectively a two-week window, with a midday deadline adding a further practical constraint for small teams. MSE Charity’s January and July 2026 Stage 1 rounds each gave applicants one week to submit an outline proposal. Asda Foundation’s 2026 Foodbank Fundamentals Fund was open for two weeks—from 8th to nd2 September—but warned that it could close earlier if application volumes were high, or in oversubscribed geographical areas. The worst combination is a short deadline with the possibility of early closure.
From open to closed
One of the more troubling developments is the increased prevalence of funders that are not open to unsolicited applications, despite having previously run open grant programmes.
The GC Gibson Charitable Trust illustrates this shift particularly starkly. In 2025 it closed an online application process early after receiving more than 600 applications, warning that individual chances of success were negligible. They failed to open their summer round in 2026 and by September 2026 announced it would stop accepting online applications altogether, explaining that it would use trustees’ networks and its database of previous applicants to identify organisations for support.
Similarly, the Kristina Martin Charitable Trust recently announced moving to an invitation-only route in 2026, following an exceptional rise in demand. Despite restructuring and tightening its eligibility criteria before the 2025 autumn grant round, the Trust received around 1,700 applications—up from 400 in 2024, a 325% increase. Its available funding rose more modestly, from £240,000 to £400,000, while the 2024 round had already awarded grants to only 7% of applicants.
It would be easy to frame this solely as a story about AI-generated applications. That is part of the context: funders report substantially increased application volumes, and some believe generative AI has made it easier to find opportunities and submit bids at scale but the underlying issue is larger than AI. It is a demand-and-capacity problem in a sector where too many organisations are competing for too little flexible funding, while many trusts have small teams and limited administration budgets.
Pauses and their impact have not disappeared
A slower rate of new restructures and pauses should not be mistaken for a return to recovery. Likewise, the launch of new funded programmes does not necessarily signal the return of the broad, open grant programmes we have seen in the past.
We are seeing extended pauses and re-pauses: funders that have paused for review, reopened or reshaped their activity, then found they need further time or another period of closure. This year, The Robertson Trust, Will Charitable Trust and the Hodge Foundation are examples of this.
After a pause that began in November 2024 and was extended four times over the following two years, The Will Charitable Trust reopened for applications at the end of September 2026. The reopening follows the Trust’s first major review of its grant-making in 36 years. While its broad funding areas remain unchanged, the Trust is narrowing its focus to make limited funds and capacity go further. It will now prioritise projects primarily based in England.
A pause can reflect a legitimate and sometimes positive process: a foundation may be reviewing its strategy, listening to communities, moving towards longer-term funding, or simplifying its processes but for applicants, the operational effect is the same: a previous opportunity disappears, sometimes with little certainty about whether, when or in what form it will return.
Where funders do emerge from pauses or restructures with new programmes, the offer is often much more focused. The Henry Smith Foundation, City Bridge Foundation, Lloyds Bank Foundation and Morrisons Foundation are examples of funders whose revised or newer programmes demonstrate a move towards clearer strategic priorities, defined beneficiary groups, specific geography, organisational types.
Is it getting worse?
UKGrantmaking reports that more than 14,000 grantmakers distributed over £24 billion in 2024–25—4% more than the previous year. Trusts and foundations, excluding Wellcome, increased their grant-making by 5% to £7.4 billion
That is encouraging—but more money in the system does not automatically mean more opportunities.
A funding landscape can distribute more while becoming harder for organisations to navigate. Short-notice rounds, tighter deadlines, narrower priorities and geographies, and rising expectations around collaboration, partnerships and lived experience all increase the work required before an application can even be submitted. Add a different online platform, process and evidence requirement for almost every funder, as well as limited character or word counts the practical burden grows further.
What fundraisers should do now
- Research behaviour, not just stated priorities
A funder’s website tells you what it says it wants to fund. Its recent grants, annual reports, repeat grantees, programme changes and application practices tell you how it actually behaves. Glance at The List and dig into accounts on the Charity Commission website (when it isn’t glitching!)
- Use trusted voices and information—and trust your judgement
Funding platforms, automated prospecting tools and AI-assisted recommendations are expanding quickly. On the face of it they can save time and highlight potential opportunities but they are starting points, not substitutes for research, professional judgement and sector voices.
You can join Jo with Lucy Stone at Fuddraising Everwhere’s Trust and Major Donors Conference, where they unpack how open and collaborative information can help charities decide when and where to apply in a difficult landscape. Book here;
This post was written by a guest contributor. The views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect the positions of Fundraising Everywhere. Content from guest authors may reflect different approaches, experiences, or perspectives to those covered in other events and training.