Grants

The Guild has 3 rounds of grant:

• Semester 1, applications typically open around August with outcomes back in September
• Semester 2, applications typically open around November / December with outcomes back in January.
• Semester 3, applications typically open around March with outcomes back in April.

In each of these rounds you can submit applications for money which will then be decided by Activities Committee.

Activities Committee is elected once per year, usually either at the end of semester 3 or early semester 1 - keep an eye out for this as it's very handy to have a member of our committee on AC.

Grants can be requested for pretty much anything except for a few specific areas:

• Anything that doesn't benefit all or atleast a decent amount of members. i.e. if a grant would only benefit 5 people, this typically won't be accepted, though this doesn't usually cause a problem for CSS since most of our events are quite large.
• Anything that would be illegal (you'd think that this would be obvious, but it's on the guild list)
• Anything that benefits non-members
• Anything not directly related to the aims or objectives of the society

• Be as specific as you can. i.e. what event is the money for, how many people usually attend, how much is it per person, etc…
• Be as detailed as possible. Don't assume AC knows what we do or how it works, what may be obvious to a CSS Committee member may be complete nonesense to AC and if they don't understand, they won't give you money.
• Don't yappa yappa yappa - AC have to read through over 100 grant applications and the entire process can sometimes be over 3 hours, don't make that more difficult by yapping endlessly without actually saying anything useful.
• Get a committee member on AC - At the start of the year the committee will often set precedents of how much they generally like to give for a specific type of request but do not make this public. Being able to find out these precedents and adapting your requests to suit can be very powerful. For example they may decide to only give a limit of £100 per expense relating to food items. Knowing this you can avoid asking for food and spend time requesting something else instead.
• Break down your requests by event or type. This makes it easier to read and understand for AC.
• Make sure that the date you put down for when it'll be spent by is within the term the grant relates to or be extremely clear about why it's not. For example if you apply for a grant in round 1 put but July for your spend by date without explanation, they might think you're hosting the event in Sem 3 and tell you to re-apply in round 3.
• Every grant will have an expiry date when you get the outcomes email and you must spend it by that date. If you don't then the grant is lost.
• Grants cannot be spent outside the financial year they're awarded in. This means that you can't apply for something for welcome week in round 3 of the previous year and you'll need to wait until round 1 of the academic year it's in. The financial year ends in July.

Emergency grants are less common, and typically aren't needed for us. These are for expenses that are unexpected and could not be foreseen or applied for as part of one of the above rounds of normal grants.

By definition, emergency grants also can't be requested to cover expenses that were requested in the normal rounds but were rejected.