Frequently Asked Questions: Climate & Environmental Justice — Round One

£5.6m — distributed via five-year core grants of £125,000, £200,000, £300,000 or £450,000 for organisations with an income of between £50,000-£1.5m.

Yes, if you are currently receiving any other grant from us, you are eligible to apply for this round. However, we may prioritise organisations we’ve not funded before or recently.

We recognise that faith-based organisations play an important role in supporting London’s communities. We can consider applications from faith-based organisations, provided your work aligns with our programme priorities and you do not use our funding to promote or advance religion. We would typically expect the activities to be inclusive and open to all, regardless of faith or belief. See General eligibility and exclusions.

Our funding is core and flexible, covering staff salaries, overheads, and other organisational costs. However, we do not fund capital costs except for essential small equipment, such as laptops. 

For example, we cannot fund the capital costs of standalone retrofit projects that focus primarily on physical improvements to buildings. 

For more information on what we can and can’t fund, please refer to our General eligibility and exclusions page and our downloadable Funding Guidelines. 

Yes, we fund new organisations. However, to be eligible, your organisation needs to have at least one year of independently examined or audited accounts and a minimum annual income of £50,000. Please refer to our General eligibility and exclusions for further details on who we can and can’t fund. 

If your organisation has only recently been formally constituted, we would still expect to see evidence of a relevant track record (for example, through previous delivery, partnerships, or the experience of key staff or trustees).

A Company Limited by Guarantee (CLG) would only be eligible if it falls within one of City Bridge Foundation’s eligible organisation types, such as a charitable company (a company that is also a registered charity). Having charitable aims or objects alone is not sufficient.

Organisations must have a total annual income of between £50,000 and £1.5m: based on your latest signed accounts. In limited circumstances, if your organisation’s income is just below or above one of these bands, we may consider your application, but only if we discuss and agree this in advance via a pre-application call. 

For example, where an organisation’s latest signed accounts show an annual income of between £40,000 and £50,000, we may still consider an application if the organisation can provide evidence through recent management accounts and projected income that it is on track to reach the £50,000 threshold this financial year. In these circumstances, applicants should be prepared to explain their financial position in the application form.

Equally, you may still be eligible if your annual income exceeds £1.5m because a proportion of that income is held for onward distribution to third parties (for example, grant-making programmes, partnerships, or received as part of a fiscal hosting arrangement, where the funds are held and managed on behalf of another organisation or project). If your adjusted income after accounting for onward distribution sits within the threshold, you are eligible to apply. 

Yes, if your organisation or group is fiscally hosted, you are still eligible to apply. Your organisation must still however meet the eligibility criteria, both for the programme and income threshold (between £50,000-£1.5m). The fiscal host’s annual income can be over £1.5m in this instance. 

To apply, the fiscal host must be the named applicant (with your organisation or group’s name in brackets), so we are able to carry out the appropriate due diligence checks and financial assessment. 

However, your organisation must provide the information on the proposed work, community leadership, track record, community relationships and intended use of funding. We will assess both the fiscal host’s capacity to manage the grant and your ability to deliver the work.

If your Community Benefit Society is legally exempt from a full audit and has an approved audit disapplication in place, we would normally expect you to provide the most recent accounts that you are legally required to produce. The requirement in our guidelines is intended to ensure applicants can demonstrate appropriate financial oversight and accountability, whether through audited or independently examined accounts.

Yes, as long as your organisation meets our programme’s priorities and eligibility criteria.

Yes. Through Standing with Londoners, City Bridge Foundation anticipates awarding around £26m per year across our four justice areas: Access to Justice, Economic Justice, Racial Justice, and Climate & Environmental Justice.

We will continue to open further funding rounds and programmes in 2026. For the latest information on upcoming opportunities, please visit our website and/​or sign up to our newsletter. 

We cannot say what future rounds of the Climate and Environmental Justice programme will look like as these are still to be developed but they will continue to evolve and change based on learning from round one and continued wider sector engagement.

Funding rounds and programmes in the other justice areas and eligibility criteria are still in development. If you feel that your work is aligned to the priorities and eligibility criteria for this round of the Climate and Environmental Justice programme then we would recommend that you apply to this round rather than holding back to apply for future rounds and programmes. 

We cannot say what future rounds of the Climate and Environmental Justice programme will look like as these are still to be developed but they will continue to evolve and change based on learning from round one and continued wider sector engagement.

Download our Funding Guidelines for detailed information on every aspect of this programme, including our programme aims, priorities and fund eligibility. 

We will make final decisions by no later than Friday, 29 January 2027. If your funding application is approved, we’ll notify you as soon as possible with a formal offer and grant agreement for your review and signature. We’ll release the first payment within two to four weeks (12 weeks from the start of Stage 2), but this timeframe may vary. Visit our programme timeline for further information. 

We’ve created comprehensive resources to answer as many questions as possible before you commit to applying. For example:

• A webinar with a British Sign Language interpretation, accompanied by a list of questions and slides
• Pre-application calls to help you with any eligibility queries
• An Eligibility Checker (no longer available)
• Detailed help with our application form via our downloadable Instructions for Applicants
• A sample application form in Word for offline editing 
• Contacts for extra help: funding@citybridgefoundation.org.uk or call 020 7332 3710 (open 8am-6pm, Monday to Friday).

Please refer to our Supporting documents guidance for a list of the documentation you need to submit with your application.

If your application is not successful at Stage 1, we’ll notify you by email by Friday 6 November 2026. After this date, you can request written feedback. If your application is not successful at Stage 2, you can request a feedback call with a member of our funding team. Please refer to our timeline for information on our two-stage decision-making process.

Yes, but if you need to submit your application in a different format, require any accessibility adjustments, or are otherwise struggling to access our online form, please contact a member of our funding team at funding@citybridgefoundation.org.uk for advice. 

For any technical issues with using our Application Portal, please contact us at funding@citybridgefoundation.org.uk or by phone on 020 7332 3710 (open 8am-6pm, Monday to Friday).

Yes, please visit the glossary page in our downloadable Funding Guidelines for more clarification on the terminology we use, such as community-led, social action, and systems change. 

Yes, as long as you commit to doing so on receipt of our grant.

No, all of our programmes have different eligibility criteria. You can access this via each programme’s:

• Eligibility Checker or 
• Grant pages

You can also visit our General eligibility and exclusions section for more information.

We cannot fund schools directly. However, if you are an organisation delivering work in and with schools we can consider an application that makes a strong case for why this is the most appropriate setting to achieve your outcomes and which aligns strongly with the fund criteria. 

For example, if you work across a wide range of schools, how is your work specifically targeting low-income and marginalised communities disproportionately affected by climate and environmental harm due to wider structural inequalities? And how is your organisation led by, accountable to, or deeply embedded within the communities it serves (not merely consulting with them).

An organisation must also show how its work contributes to longer-term systems change. We recognise that schools can be important sites for delivering immediate protection from climate and environmental harms (such as extreme heat, flooding, or air pollution), or for general awareness education and awareness raising activities. However, we will only fund education and climate adaptation activities delivered in schools where they form part of a broader strategy for longer-term systems change. 

Organisations should be able to demonstrate how they will influence policies, practices, decision-making, resource allocation or community power beyond an individual school. This could include shaping local authority approaches, influencing transport or planning decisions, building community advocacy, or developing models that can be adopted more widely.

We are particularly interested in organisations that:

• Use schools as demonstration sites to influence wider policy, practice or investment.
• Strengthen the voice and influence of children, families and communities affected by environmental injustice.
• Generate evidence that informs local authority, transport, planning or public health decision-making.
• Embed climate resilience, nature-based solutions or environmental justice approaches within institutions and systems beyond a single school.
• Develop models that can be adopted, replicated or scaled across multiple schools, neighbourhoods or local authority areas.
• Secure commitments or changes from decision-makers that will continue beyond the lifetime of the grant.

Organisations focused solely on general awareness raising and/​or improving conditions within a single school are unlikely to be funded unless they can demonstrate a clear pathway to wider systemic impact.

For example, an organisation creates shaded spaces, plants trees and delivers climate education in a school affected by air pollution, while also supporting students and parents to advocate for safer streets, contributing evidence to local transport decisions, and helping embed climate resilience measures across schools in the wider area.

While we recognise that many organisations work collaboratively and in partnership with others, this funding round has not been specifically designed to support formal partnerships or consortium-led approaches where the funding will be split. 

This funding round has been developed primarily to provide core, flexible funding to individual community-led organisations.

That said, we are open to receiving partnership applications if that is your preference. If you wish to apply as part of a partnership, there must be a named lead organisation who submits the application and holds the grant. 

All organisations included in the partnership application must meet the fund’s eligibility criteria, including the income threshold criteria. Partnership arrangements are intended to strengthen and enhance the proposed work, rather than provide a route for organisations that would not otherwise be eligible to access the fund. 

It should be clear how each organisation contributes to and strengthens the proposed work, for example through additional expertise, capabilities, relationships, reach, or delivery capacity.

Applications involving partnerships will be considered alongside all other applications, but we will be looking for clear rationale and an agreed way of working, such as how decisions will be made, how accountability to the community will work etc. Where a substantial proportion of funding is intended for the partner organisation(s), applicants should be clear on the structure of the arrangement and explain how this will support the aims of the proposal.

When we talk about partnership applications we are talking about applying to the fund as a partnership, with a lead applicant and funding potentially being shared across multiple organisations. If you wish you use your core funding grant to develop and strengthen your partnerships as part of your organisation’s work and mission, that is fine under the terms of this funding, you would not need to submit a partnership bid.

By ​‘community-led’, we mean work that is shaped and driven by the people most affected by the issues you’re addressing. This could include communities having real decision-making power, influencing priorities and strategy, or being meaningfully involved in leadership and governance. It also means being accountable to the communities you work with through strong, ongoing relationships.

An example would be an organisation whose leadership, governance and programme design are shaped by people with lived experience of issues such as racial inequality or economic exclusion. In community-led organisations, lived experience informs priorities and decision-making power sits within the community rather than solely with staff, trustees or external stakeholders.

Community leadership can take different forms, and we do not expect all organisations to demonstrate it in the same way. However, we typically look for evidence that:

• Community members influence governance and decision-making, for example through trustee positions, leadership roles, resident panels, community assemblies or other formal decision-making structures.
• People with lived experience shape organisational strategy and priorities, identify solutions as well as challenges, and have opportunities to lead campaigns, research, programmes or community activity.
• Organisations are accountable to their communities through long-term relationships, transparent communication, regular opportunities for engagement and clear mechanisms for responding to community feedback and concerns.

Ultimately, we are interested in understanding where decision-making power sits, how lived experience shapes the organisation’s work, and how the organisation remains accountable to the community it exists to serve.

‘Systems change’ means addressing the root causes of climate and environmental inequality, not just the immediate issues people face.

In practice, this could include building community power and leadership, influencing policy or service delivery, shifting public narratives, or developing community-led solutions that inform wider change. We recognise this will look different for each organisation, but your work should show how it contributes to longer-term change. Examples can be found in the Funding Guidelines.

For an extended definition, please see our downloadable Funding Guidelines. 

Your work does not need to cover all approaches, but your organisation must be working towards longer-term systems change (in a way proportionate to your role and approach). 

Work can span more than one approach if those approaches link together and strengthen the overall impact. All work must demonstrate a commitment to longer-term systems change, and all organisations must be community-led.

Your work will not be eligible if it does not contribute to longer‑term systems change, i.e. it is one‑off, short‑term, or only responds to immediate needs, without addressing underlying causes.

For applications which involve campaigning, our team will consider whether the work:

• is politically non-partisan (i.e. neutral and not affiliated with any one political party),
• is mission-aligned (e.g. with the charitable purpose of both the applicant and City Bridge Foundation),
• is legally compliant (e.g. with Charity Commission guidance CC9),
• and can be supported without undue legal, regulatory or reputational risk.

Campaigning work will also be assessed against the priorities and eligibility criteria of the programme you have applied to.

For further guidance, please see the Charity Commission: 

Your organisation does not need to work exclusively on climate issues, but it must be able to demonstrate a clear and credible track record in climate and environmental justice work over time.

This includes demonstrating that this work is ongoing (not one-off or short-term), shaped by trusted relationships with the communities you work with, and that it informs your organisation’s priorities, partnerships and plans. Your work should also contribute to longer-term systems change.

Yes. You can include service delivery in your work, particularly where it responds to immediate needs and challenges faced by the communities you work with. 

However, this programme focuses on work that also contributes to longer-term systems change. This means your service delivery should be clearly connected to broader goals, such as building community power, influencing policy or practice, or shifting narratives.

We are less likely to fund work that focuses only on short-term services without demonstrating how it contributes to longer-term change.

Yes. This is core and flexible funding, so it can support organisational development, partnerships, collaboration, and learning. You must show how this contributes to your organisation’s work and longer-term impact.

City Bridge Foundation only funds work that benefits people living in London (in one or more of the 32 London boroughs and/​or the City of London) – we cannot fund work delivered outside London or for people living elsewhere. 

Your work can be focused in just one neighbourhood or borough, or multiple places in London.

Not usually. This programme provides core and flexible funding to organisations rather than project grants. 

We assess applications primarily at an organisational level, considering factors such as community leadership, track record, alignment with climate and environmental justice, and contribution to longer-term systems change. 

While applicants may describe examples of their work, eligibility is not determined by a single project or activity.