About the Ideas and Pioneers Fund
We provide grants of up to £15,000 to support people with a vision of a better society to explore their ideas for change.
We’re open to applications all year round and the process simple – just a short form and a two-minute video.
This is the Fund for you:
- If you’ve got an innovative idea or new approach.
Our focus is on supporting the earliest stages of idea development – even if your plan is risky or experimental. We’re looking for potential, not the finished product. - Whether you’re applying as an individual, charity, social enterprise or limited company.
We’re open to anyone – from individuals, groups of up to three people and organisations with up to five employees. - If you haven’t applied for funding before.
We want to be one of the first funders for new ideas and we particularly welcome first time applicants. - If you’re young.
We’d like most of the people we support to be between 18-30 years old - Whatever your background – we support everyone from activists to researchers, as long as you’re focused on exploring an idea for change
To recognise the urgent need to address the historical power imbalance between who leads, creates and makes work, we will prioritise support to people who are most affected by systemic oppression and or discrimination. This means Black, Asian and other groups who experience racism[1], Deaf, disabled and neurodiverse people who experience the effects of ableism, those who identify as sitting at the intersections of several minoritized identities as well as people experiencing poverty.
This video introduces some of the people we’re currently supporting.
You can also read about some of the experiences of the people we’ve supported in the past further down the page.
Apply now to #StartSomethingAmazing
[1] At Paul Hamlyn Foundation, we recognise that people who experience racism are from diverse backgrounds and identities and are often grouped together under one term for ease (e.g. BAME, the acronym for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic). However, we are committed to naming and tackling the individual experiences of structural oppression people face as the racism they experience rather than conflating their experience as that of all non-white people.