To be eligible to apply to Round 5 of the Independent Age Grants Fund:

• Your organisation must be an exempt charity or registered as a charity with The Charity Commission for England and Wales, The Charity Commission for Northern Ireland, or The Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR).
• Your work must be based in the UK.
• You must have a minimum of two years’ published charity accounts, and if your annual income is above £25,000, you must have had your accounts audited or independently examined.
• You must have at least three trustees and at least one paid member of staff (part-time is fine).
• You must have an annual income of £1 million or less (averaged across the last three financial years).
• You must have no more than 1 year’s expenditure in unrestricted reserves based on the last set of accounts. The only exception is for smaller organisations, with an annual income of £100,000 or less.
• If you have received a grant from Independent Age in a previous round, you should have completed the work funded previously and completed and returned the monitoring form.

In addition, we want to support organisations:

• who work only or mostly with older people – as a guide, at least 50% of your services users should be older people, but if necessary, we will be flexible about this requirement, particularly if you are a smaller, community based organisation doing, for example, significant intergenerational work;
• who mostly worked face to face with older people before the pandemic – for example, through social and day centres; in person individual befriending, counselling or support; or through provision of group activities;
• who have continued to support those older people during and since the initial national lockdown – for example, by delivering food and other necessities, or providing online or telephone based services and support;
• who have thought carefully about how to move safely towards re-establishing their face-to-face services and have made plans that enable those services to remain flexible so that older people continue to be supported as local and national restrictions change.