Hi all

I have been the chair of the Friends of Grindleton School PTA for a few years now and we have just achieved charity status. I have started to look into grants or potential avenues of income for our charity but I get the impression (mainly from the grantsforschools.info site) that a lot of grant providers will not fund schools or projects for schools. 

What I'm trying to understand is how we navigate this potential blocker. It goes without saying that we (the charity) are an entirely different legal entity to the school we support, but ultimately if the money we request will be used for school-related projects I imagine grant providers will still be reluctant to fund.

Any general advice from PTA's/Friends Of charities or anybody at this point would be greatly appreciated - whilst not new to the world of PTAs, we are new to the world of charities and grant-finding so open to all suggestions.

On a slightly different tangent I'd be keen to hear of any fundraising ideas which have been successful for your PTA. What we find is a lot of ours are big effort/low return, for example we are currently running a raffle which has taken my wife (the secretary of the charity) two weeks of hard slog to push and we're currently sat at about £150 of income before platform deductions.

So I guess a general chat about "how do we get money into our school" is where I'm at. Things we tend to fund include;

Some things we'd like to explore;

These projects are all well outside of the scope of what we can currently offer so will be reliant on either some really good fundraisers or grant funding of some sort.

 

Sorry for the massive post.