The Learning Journey Fund offers funding for charities in Kent to discover new ways to improve their organisation’s performance.
Charities and community groups across Kent and Medway are encouraged to apply for £2,000 funding from the Learning Journey Fund, which was established in 2022, to allow charitable organisations to discover new insights and gain inspiration to improve their performance.
Natalie Smith, Director of Grants and Impact and Deputy Chief Executive, Kent Community Foundation said, “The Learning Journey Fund is about ambition, sharing ideas, and having space to think and plan. It is funded with money from Martello Fund, one of the funds that we administer. These philanthropic funds allow us to match those who want to help, with those who need the help and are a vital part of the financial support structure that charitable organisations rely on across Kent and Medway.”
Previous recipients of funding from the Learning Journey Fund visited and learnt from regional, national and international best practice, so they could plan their own next steps and share learning across the region. At the end of the journey the grant recipients were asked to provide a blog or vlog about how they used their grant from the Learning Journey Fund.
Catching Lives, a charity supporting people who are homeless in Canterbury and East Kent, received a grant from the Learning Journey Fund in September 2023, to enable members of their client-facing team to visit other homelessness day centres, to see how they deliver their service.
Tasmin Maitland, Chief Executive, Catching Lives explained how the funding helped them. “The Catching Lives team was struck by the wide range of day centres that exist – there are so many differences in buildings, opening hours, services and ethos. There were services with a strong focus on work and learning, on creativity, on social enterprise, and on health and well-being.
“Buildings and physical spaces were a key theme, especially how they affect the feel of a service. Our day centre is in an old warehouse and feels quite functional, with a lot of hard surfaces. Colleagues described the contrast with the Barons Court Project which is housed in a four-storey terraced house, with a cosy living-room style space. While this would be hard to do in our more open plan building, we will use this example when choosing new furniture and lighting to create a more psychologically informed environment that promotes feelings of safety and ‘home’. A lot of the day centres used plants and artwork to create a pleasant, calm environment. We’ve been inspired to add more plants to the Centre, bringing the benefits of nature into our indoor space. We’re also exploring how to display more of our clients’ artwork.
“It’s hard to get a true feeling of a day centre during a single visit – every day is different, and often each part of the day is different too. But we really enjoyed seeing such a varied range of provision and meeting our peers in other day centres. It opened our minds to alternative ways of working, which will help us to design projects and to make improvements in future. We’ve extended invitations to the teams we met to come and visit Catching Lives in Canterbury and hope these learning journeys will be the first of many.”
Applications for the Learning Journey Fund are open and close on 3 March 2025.
To contact Kent Community Foundation about funding for charities and community groups visit www.kentcf.org.uk/funding
Notes to Editors
To find out more about the impact funding from the Learning Journey Fund has, visit www.kentcf.org.uk/learning-journey-fund
About the Learning Journey Fund
The Kent Community Foundation Learning Journey Fund supports applications to discover new insights and inspiration to improve their organisation’s performance. The funding of up to £2,000 will allow the recipients to visit organisations and learn from national and international best practice, to plan their own next steps and to share learning across the county.
We want applicants to consider which organisations are already doing a brilliant job in areas you want to improve? Who is leading on this nationally or internationally? What can you learn from them and how can you put your learning into practice? If you have the ambition to be bold to drive your charity or community group forward, we want to hear from you.
Applications might be to visit a charity that is an exemplar for local engagement, environmental sustainability, or work with refugees. It could ask to learn from a care home that is pioneering client-led services, a museum that is bringing their collection to life, a resident’s group that runs an amazing community garden, or a sports club that is truly inclusive.
Following the initial visit or visits, The Leaning Journey Fund will pay to help the successful applicants to think through their learning, and to bring in a coach, advisor, consultant, or facilitator to help develop their plans and next steps. The leaning will be shared via a blog or presentation posted on the Learning Journey Fund page of the Kent Community Foundation website so that others can learn and develop too.
Applications should include a description of what you hope to learn and why this will make a difference to your charity, detail of who you would like to visit, why you have chosen them and how you will use the knowledge you gain, a timeline and a budget. In addition to this written information a video of the applicant talking about themselves, and their application is also required.
Grants are up to £2,000 and can be used to cover different elements of your learning journey:
- Visit: for example, travel, accommodation, food
- Plan: for example, working with an advisor to think through your next steps (this can include fees, venue hire, away day expenses)
- Your time: for example, to cover your time on the visit, time for thinking and planning as well as sharing your learning.
Applications close on 3 March 2025
About Kent Community Foundation
Experienced grant-maker Kent Community Foundation is the organisation behind the organisations and has been finding, funding, and supporting some of the smallest voluntary groups in the county for over twenty three years. In this time, it has distributed £60 million to support thousands of small charities and deserving causes where a modest sum of money can make a significant impact.
Kent Community Foundation is part of a UK wide accredited network of forty-seven Community Foundations who are committed to improving the lives of local people and communities, particularly the most vulnerable, isolated, and disadvantaged by matching those who want to help, with those who need the help.
Responsible for more than one hundred philanthropic funds, Kent Community Foundation is unrivalled in its knowledge of local causes and assists individuals, families, and businesses who want to help, to establish and administer their own charitable funds.
Kent Community Foundation funding priorities –
- Children, Young People & Families
Supporting disadvantaged children and young people’s physical and mental health, encouraging positive choices and staying safe. - Vulnerable Adults
Helping those who may need extra care dealing with challenging issues or those at risk of social exclusion or discrimination.
3. Elderly and Isolated
Enabling elderly adults to stay well, healthy, independent and free from social isolation.
4. Employability, Skills & Enterprise
Creating opportunities to develop skills and confidence and have a positive impact in areas and groups of people with high unemployment.
5. Environment
Encouraging community action to improve and protect local spaces with support sustainable ways of living.
