Merchant Taylors' Foundation Funding Application

Apply for a Grant from Merchant Taylors' Foundation

Tailoring Brighter Futures

Our Small Grants Scheme is for community-based charities who operate exclusively in the London Boroughs of Hackney, Lewisham, Southwark, and Tower Hamlets. We also consider applications from organisations who can demonstrate they deliver most of their charitable activity in one or more of these boroughs. Your organisation must be working with people who are in need due to age, ill health, disability, financial hardship, or any other form of disadvantage. Our Small Grants Scheme FAQs can be found Small Grant Scheme FAQs

Following a recent review, we have identified a gap in applications from organisations supporting aging or older people and we actively encourage these charities to apply. By older people we mean those of retirement age and above. If your project does not work with older people, we still welcome your application.

We award grants for unrestricted use or project funding. Unrestricted funding is more flexible and allows you to use the grant wherever it is needed. This may mean using the funds on training and development, improved governance, running costs, better technology etc – it's up to you. Both types of funding must be used in line with your charitable objectives in your governing document.

Last year we awarded small grants to 24 organisations. This was 48% of all applicants.

Our Small Grant Scheme will open for applications on the 1st of October 2025 and close for applications at 5pm on the 31st of December 2025.

Merchant Taylors’ Foundation Small Grant Scheme Checklist

To see if you are eligible to apply for our Small Grants Scheme, complete this checklist and read our Small Grant Scheme FAQs. Please do not apply if you do not meet the checklist and eligibility criteria explained in the FAQs. If you have any queries, please contact charities@merchant-taylors.co.uk

My organisation is a UK registered charity
My organisation is supporting ‘people who are in need due to age, ill health, disability, financial hardship or some other form of disadvantage’.
My organisation operates exclusively in/or most of our charitable work is in one or more of the Small Grant Scheme's four boroughs (Hackney, Lewisham, Southwark, and Tower Hamlets).
My organisation is not an international, national, or regional charity.

Merchant Taylors in Need

The Foundation also provides limited financial help in appropriate cases to:

'Poor Freemen of the Merchant Taylors' Company'
'Poor dependants or poor apprentices of Freemen of the Merchant Taylors' Company'

We only have capacity to provide help on a modest financial scale, for example the cost of replacing broken white goods in an emergency for someone who meets the above criteria and is unable to pay for the items due to financial hardship.

Unfortunately we don’t have the financial or staffing resources to provide one-off financial help on a large scale, or to help with longer term or potentially open-ended financial commitments such as:

Paying school fees to enable a child to continue in their current school
Subsidising the cost of private sector rental accommodation.

Our staff team is small so unfortunately we aren’t able to provide staff help in kind, for example to find new accommodation or to arrange a nursing home place or a care package.

Please contact us here, with a brief explanation of your circumstances including your connection to Merchant Taylors’ Company.