The 12 Grants of Christmas

By Anna Scott December 18, 2019

Updated December 2022.

With Christmas around the corner, we haven’t just been eating endless mince pies. Well, we have been, daily, but we’ve also used our grants data search engine GrantNav to bring you some festive funding and grants yule love to get you in the Christmas spirit 🎄

By David Kane and Anna Scott

It’s been a brilliant year for the open grants movement, with many new funders publishing their grants data to the 360Giving standard, and helping to give us all a fuller picture of the voluntary sector in the UK.

We thought we’d celebrate with a festive foray through the £30 billion worth of grants data that’s being shared. We’ve got creative with some seasonal searches using our search engine, GrantNav, to bring you… the 12 Grants of Christmas!

Twelve drummers drumming 🥁

Drumming workshops and performances for those with mobility issues, from the Heart of England Community Foundation (£1,000)

Eleven pipers piping 🎶

Music therapy and piping tuition for Friends of Pilrig Park School, from the Robertson Trust (£5,000)

Ten lords a-leaping 🤸🏾

Gymnastics equipment for a gymnastics club at a school in Scotland, from The National Lottery Community fund (£9,970)

Nine ladies dancing 💃

Dancing lessons for women and girls from minority backgrounds, from Sport England (£22,000)

Eight maids a-milking 🐄

Support for the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association, from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (£60,000)

Seven swans a-swimming 🦢

Support for SWAN, the advocacy network for individuals with physical or mental ill health, from Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (£5,000)

Six geese a-laying 🥚

Support for Geese Theatre who works with individuals who have offended, from The Bromley Trust (£10,000)

Five – gold – rings! 💫💫💫💫💫

A pop-up boxing ring to help young people learn to box, from the Greater London Authority (£10,000)

Four calling birds 🦚

Conservation for bird communities in Scotland’s Rainforest for the RSPB, from Esmee Fairbairn Foundation (£65,500)

Three French hens

Support to perform a play in French for school children, from the Community Foundation serving Tyne & Wear and Northumberland (£8,090)

Two turtle doves 🕊️

Support for North York Moors National Park to conserve visiting turtle doves, from The National Lottery Heritage Fund (£64,000)

… and a partridge in a pear tree 🍐

Funding for a music performance at the Pear Tree Special School near Preston, from the Cooperative Group (£2,770)

More festive fun-ds…

And because Christmas is a time for giving, here are some other festive grants and a bit about ho- ho- how we found them.

In GrantNav, we searched for Christmas to begin with, and then searched Christmas Santa to generate more results. As GrantNav’s Help section tells you, if you put several words together in the search-bar, it will generate all grants that feature those terms (whether one or more).

Photo by erin mckenna on Unsplash — Photo by erin mckenna

So, searching Christmas Santa Jingle Turkey will generate a long list of grants that include any of those terms – some might be grants for Santa suits, others Christmas dinners.

The ‘total GBP awarded’ amount will be for all of them – including grants related to Turkey the country, which as you might expect are more common than grants about turkey the bird.

If you wanted to find grants about, say, sherry for Santa’s elves, you’d search sherry AND santa AND elves…

(Though sadly for the elves there don’t seem to be any such grants. Honestly, won’t someone please think of the elves?)

Grants yule love

(Some are more tenuous than others, but bear with us…)

Why not try for yourself? A search-engine for grants data, GrantNav lets you explore and download in detail where and how much funding goes, across billions of pounds of grants.