Grants for CICs: how to find funding for a Community Interest Company

Where CIC grant funding comes from

• National Lottery distributors — community, heritage, sport and arts funding, much of it open to non-charitable community organisations.
• Local and combined authorities — small community grants, ward budgets, high street and regeneration pots.
• Community foundations — county-level funders distributing dozens of local and donor-advised programmes.
• Corporate and utility funds — supermarket, bank, energy and water company community programmes, often quick to apply for.
• Trusts and foundations — the largest pool, and the one where charity-only restrictions most often apply.
• Government and agency schemes — themed funds tied to policy priorities such as employment, health inequality or net zero.

How eligibility actually works

Run every opportunity through the same five filters before you read the application form:

1. Organisation type. Look for an explicit reference to Community Interest Companies or CICs in the funder’s eligibility information. Broad terms such as “community organisation”, “not-for-profit” or “social enterprise” should not automatically be assumed to include CICs.
2. Geography. Many funds are restricted to a county, city region or specific postcodes.
3. Beneficiaries and theme. Your primary group must be the one the funder names, not one you can plausibly bend to.
4. Income band and age. Some funders exclude organisations under a year old, or over a turnover threshold.
5. Cost type. Check whether core costs, salaries and overheads are eligible, or only project delivery and capital.

If you do not meet a mandatory eligibility criterion, you should not apply.

What a strong CIC application contains

• A specific need, evidenced locally — data plus a concrete example, not general statements about deprivation.
• A defined activity with numbers: how many people, how often, for how long, delivered by whom.
• Outcomes you can actually measure, with the method named.
• A full-cost budget including a fair share of management, premises and finance costs.
• Sustainability — what happens after the grant, in one honest paragraph.
• Governance — directors, policies, and how the asset lock protects the funder’s money.

Address the CIC question head-on

If a funder accepts CICs but mostly funds charities, use two or three sentences to explain the asset lock, that surpluses are reinvested in the community purpose, and that you file an annual CIC34 report. It removes the doubt rather than leaving an assessor to guess. New to the structure? Start with what is a Community Interest Company.

Common reasons CIC applications fail

• Applying to a charity-only funder.
• Describing activity rather than the change it creates.
• A budget with no overheads, so the project quietly runs at a loss.
• Requesting an amount far outside the funder’s typical grant size.
• Generic text reused across funders with the wrong priorities left in.
• Submitting late because supporting documents were not ready.

Run it as a process

A repeatable system makes applying easier to sustain. Keep a live pipeline with the funder, deadline, amount, effort estimate and decision date. Maintain a document pack (accounts, policies, CIC34, bank details, director list) — missing documents can cause avoidable delays, so keeping a current funding document pack is worthwhile. Keep a reusable core narrative for need, activity, outcomes and budget, then tailor rather than rewrite. Record every outcome and ask for feedback on rejections.

The remaining bottleneck is the weekly search. GrantNest researches UK funding opportunities and excludes schemes where CIC eligibility cannot be verified from official funder information; individual eligibility still depends on the organisation, project and full fund criteria. Broader funding routes beyond grants are covered in how to get funding for a CIC in the UK.

Frequently asked questions