What we fund through grants

We all depend on the natural environment. It provides the essentials of life, inspires us, and is central to our health, wealth and happiness.
We get a lot from our natural environment: resources and raw materials to use, services to support us and personal benefits from enjoying it. As a society we need to value these benefits and, by doing so, ensure that people can benefit now and in the future.

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CCW’s priorities for grant aid for 2013-2014

In these challenging economic times, we must make sure that CCW’s grant funding works hard to achieve our goals, in partnership with others. This is why CCW’s grant aid seeks to support organisations in Wales in a broad range of activities from gaining knowledge about geodiversity, biodiversity and ecosystems to delivering a healthy natural environment and from ensuring that people have the opportunities to enjoy the outdoor world to sustainable economic development.

Grant pillars and cross cutting themes

CCW has three grant pillars, outlined above, that reflect the broad scope of our work, and every grant should fit within one (or more) of these pillars – see below for more details about each grant pillar. While we are looking to our Local Authority partners to deliver equally across these grant pillars, all projects should provide environmental benefits for society and the economy. So to be eligible for a grant, projects must also be designed to deliver benefits under at least one of the cross cutting themes. These are regeneration, health & wellbeing, capacity building within an organisation or the environmental sector as a whole or projects that support or test the emerging Natural Environment Framework (NEF) principles.

Our grants are intended as a catalyst and so CCW will be looking for grant projects that develop, pilot and demonstrate, as well as delivering immediate benefits. CCW will normally offer funding that helps projects start or that creates capacity in organisations for development of initiatives.

CCW will prioritise proposals that applicants develop in partnership with CCW and which contribute to a coordinated effort. In this way, we will increase the value and impact of work that supports our priorities for grants.

We do not normally offer grants for ongoing projects or maintenance and we will normally only offer grants for physical infrastructure where it is integral to projects. In addition, we do not support the development of general websites. We will however, consider grants funding for web pages and innovative digital solutions where it is integral to the success of the project.

You will need to cross reference your indicative bid application to CCW's grant pillars, cross-cutting themes and corporate plan outcomes. Please see 'related articles' for more information.