Background

The Prudence Trust is a grant-making charity established in 2020. It invests in the advancement of young people’s mental health services and research in the UK.

Objectives of Fund

This fund aims to support charities and community interest companies working with young people aged between 10 and 30 and help to build monitoring and evaluation (M&E) capacity and achieve the following aims:  

• Funded organisations are more confident they are collecting the right data to make informed decisions on programme delivery, staff resourcing, cost-effectiveness, and making a case for fundraising and communicating work externally.
• Funded organisations are more confident their programmes are being delivered well and effectively.
• Funding organisations have improved their capabilities around making the best use of data available to them. This could be measured through an organisational baseline and grant end data skills and capacity assessment as part of this grant programme.
• Funded organisations are better positioned to carry out periodic or ongoing evaluations of their services based on their own good quality data.
• Funded organisations have more reliable information about their work and its effectiveness, making them more credible to other charities, funders, and policymakers.

Value Notes

A total of £1 million is available.

Around five or six grants are available.

Grants start from £10,000. There is no maximum amount, however, the Trust is less likely to consider requests over £300,000.

Who Can Apply

UK-registered charities and community interest companies (CICs) with an income of above £250,000 and two years of published accounts can apply.

Groups must also:

• Work exclusively with young people.
• Deliver direct mental health support (therapy or activities socially prescribed for young people experiencing anxiety or depression as mental health support). 
• Already collect mental health or well-being data.

Location

UK.

Restrictions

The following are not eligible for funding:

• Unregistered charities.
• Organisations that have been running for less than two years.
• Organisations that do not exclusively work with young people (although applications for projects supporting parents may be considered).
• Organisations that do not deliver direct mental health support.
• Organisations that do not already collect mental health data from their work.
• The costs of service delivery.
• Retrospective costs (funding will only be considered for costs incurred after June 2025.

Eligible Expenditure

Grants will help organisations to bolster their capacity to do quality data collection and to make use of that data to periodically review services.

Eligible costs include:

• Upskilling of staff responsible for monitoring an evaluation.
• Salaries for dedicated data or M&E roles.
• Software or hardware needed to improve data infrastructure, such as databases.
• Costs to work with an external evaluator or academic on specific programmes.
• External data management and evaluation expertise.

Grants will be awarded in June 2025.