The Sir Jules Thorn Charitable Trust: Hospice Fund

Overview

The Trust ran a separate funding stream for hospices between 2018 and 2021. The fund made small grants to support hospices’ core costs or towards small capital projects (such as replacing or upgrading equipment). The Trust ran additional funding rounds in response to the Coronavirus pandemic and during 2020 and 2021 awarded a total of just over £1 million to support hospices’ core costs.

The Trustees reviewed all our grant programmes at the end of 2021 to ensure the Trust continues to focus its funding in areas where it can make the greatest difference. Following this review, the separate Hospice Fund has now closed and hospices can apply for support through:

• The Ann Rylands Small Donations Programme, which now offers grants of up to £5,000 to smaller hospices – including hospice at home services – and other charities to support core costs. The programme aims to support smaller organisations that may not have the fundraising infrastructure of larger hospices or that receive lower levels of statutory funding, and help them to sustain existing provision
• The Innovation and Improvement in Health and Care Fund, which offers capital or project funding to support improvements in care. This new programme aims to support hospices, other charities and NHS organisations to develop new, more integrated models of health and care. It is anticipated that awards will typically be in a range of £100K-£500K to support projects which are scalable or replicable across different care settings rather than smaller scale activity within individual hospices.

Eligibility

Applications will only be accepted from hospices that are charities registered in the UK, and are members of either Hospice UK or Together for Short Lives.

In order to focus the available funding on areas of greatest need, the Trust will only make awards to hospices whose current level of free reserves is equivalent to 12 months or less of their operating costs.

Eligible hospices may apply for a one-off grant of up to £5,000 to support their core costs. Applications for capital funding or discrete projects will not be accepted for this year’s funding round

More information about grants awarded under this programme can be found on the Previous Awards page of our website.

Hospices which received an award in earlier funding rounds, or which were unsuccessful in November 2020, are eligible to re-apply.