The annual call for applications to the Catherine Cookson Foundation is now live on the Staff and Student Homepages.

The Trustees of the Foundation are anxious to publicise the availability of funds as widely as possible in order to encourage applications and if you are able to further disseminate the information that would be very helpful.

To be clear, these are internal funds which become available as interest builds up on an endowment fund, and therefore applicants do not need to go through the normal research application process.

The link to our Executive Office page about the Foundation can be found here:

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/executive/office/responsibilities/CatherineCooksonFoundation.htm

Small grants, normally in a range between £500 and £5000, are made on a one-off, non-recurrent basis to projects where the Trustees consider their intervention will make a significant difference between success and failure, and where there are no other obvious routes to obtain significant support. See list of previous award winners to get a flavour of the type of projects that have been supported already. Unfortunately the Trustees are not able to consider applications for PhD study or applications which are of a standard research grant format, the latter should be directed to the relevant research council.

The criteria used in selecting projects for support are, that they:

• should be of modest size;
• should be the type of activity in which Dame Catherine Cookson herself might have had an interest;
• should have no obvious alternative source of support, or be the sort of project where support from the Foundation could be pump-priming for other financial help;
• should have local interest;
• should be of benefit to students.

It is a condition of any grant that a final report on the project is submitted to the Trustees. This should take the form of an A4 document, two pages in length, listing original objectives and saying to what extent they have been met together with a statement of how much was received from the Foundation and how it was spent.  If a final report is not forthcoming within a reasonable time, the Trustees reserve the right to request the return of the funds.

The annual call for applications is now underway with a closing date of 5 pm on Friday 18 May 2018. An application form is available here and should be made in the form of a single pdf document (combining application form, supporting statement and cv if appropriate) and submitted to Alison.Pickard@ncl.ac.uk