You need to be employed in the UK social care sector in a role that is involved in or supports the provision of adult, elderly or disability care, such as:
- Residential social care
- Domiciliary/home care
- Supported living care
- Daycare
- Private care
You need to have been employed within the sector for at least 3 months
You need to have encountered a change in circumstances in the last year that has had a significant financial impact. This can include:
- A sudden or unexpected loss of income
- A sudden or unexpected illness or injury
- A sudden or unexpected change in living circumstances or loss of home
- A relationship breakdown
- An issue of domestic abuse
- Death of a close relative
Yes. We impose the following financial thresholds:
- Applicants must not be over 25% of the Minimum Income Standard(MIS).This calculation was developed by the poverty research charity, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and its assessment of what is needed to have a decent minimum living standard in the UK. (Managers’ incomes are typically above this threshold)
If a previous application to us was declined, you can apply again. But please consider why you were declined and check our eligibility criteria before applying again.
You can only apply again if you received your grant over 24 months ago.
Grant awards are typically limited to a maximum of £500.
We may be able to assist with:
- Daily living expenses
- Essential whitegoods
- Essential household items
- Moving costs
- Health improvement aids and adaptations
- Travel expenses to hospital
- Essential household repairs
- Car repairs
- Funeral costs
- Bankruptcy and Debt Relief Order (DRO) application fee
- Fees to prevent eviction
We do not provide assistance for:
- Legal fees and costs of legal representation
- Payment of fines
- House purchase
- Private medical treatment
- Private education
- Higher education course fees
- Carpets
Mandatory supporting documents required by all applicants include:
- Proof of your employment history in the care sector (one document)
- Recent payslip
- Confirmation letter from your employer stating your period of employment
- SSP stating time off due to health issue.
- Medical letter confirming the condition
- Mobility aids need to be recommended by a medical professional.
- If you are requesting a grant to pay towards home adaptations due to disability, you must have applied for a Disabled Facilities Grant and have a recent occupational therapist’s letter recommending the adaptations
- Two Contractor Quotes
- Proof of Eviction Proceedings
- Letter from a Debt Advice Specialist
- New tenancy agreement
- Removal quotes
- Letter from a domestic violence support organisation
- Funeral bill
- Statement of remaining balance
- evidence of your application for the government’s Funeral Expenses Payment if you are eligible
Depending on the nature of your change of circumstances and your reason for applying, we also request:
Medical confirmation of illness/injury:
Repair Costs:
Preventing Eviction:
Bankruptcy or DRO Requests:
Moving Costs:
Domestic Violence:
Funeral Costs:
We must receive all required documentation before we are able to assess an application
Please apply online here. Fill out the application online and upload your supporting documents.
If you are unable to upload your documents, you may send them via email to grants@thecwc.org.uk
You can begin the application and return to it later.
If our form is not accessible due to a disability need, we encourage you to access help through a friend or agency(such as Citizens Advice). If you need further support, please contact grants@thecwc.org.uk.
Once you’ve submitted your application you’ll receive an automated response which will include a link to your application and a reference number which begins with GA 0000 followed by 4 numbers. Keep this safe – you can use it to check on the progress of your application online on our Grants Tracker and it’s the best way to see progress on your application.
We kindly ask that you do not keep emailing us to to check on the progress of your application – it takes time to respond to emails; The more emails we get, the slower we will be at approving applications. The best way to check on progress is to use the grants tracker
It can take up to three working weeks to assess and process an application if all the relevant documentation has been submitted. If the documentation has not been provided on submission it will inevitably take longer.
The Care Workers’ Charity will notify applicants via email regarding the outcome of their grant application.
This is very unlikely to happen. Check your junk mail as some of our emails to you may end up in there and we may be responding to your query or waiting for a response from you.
Grant award payments are issued in one of three ways:
1.Payments directly to grantees via BACS (please note the payment can take up to 5 working days to appear in the account)
2.Payments directly to third parties via BACS (ex: funeral homes, contractors, etc)
3.Whitegood and household item delivery via our suppliers, which will coordinate delivery with grantees directly.
Please give us some feedback! Good or not so good, we can learn from your feedback and when it’s good it’s lovely for us to share it with the team. When it’s not so good we can learn from it and improve our processes. We always want to do our best for you but we can’t do that if we don’t hear from you. We’d love to hear your stories. We would love to do a short video interview with you, or a phone interview and if you’d prefer to be anonymous, we could work with you on writing your story and using stock photographs if you prefer. Please get in touch by emailing info@thecwc.org.uk
MANDATORY: If you are applying for a new starter grant please provide one of the following (one documents) :
Please provide:
- Confirmation letter from your employer stating your conditional employment
- Confirmation email from your employer stating your period of employment
- Confirmation of leave date if previously employed in the form of an email or letter (must have left previous care role in 3 months or more) Invoice or quotes for costs incurred depending on the grant you are applying for.
Questions for care work employers
What do I need to do as HR professional who has been contacted by you?
Once we have received an application from a care worker we automatically trigger an email to the person they have named as their HR Manager. We do this as we need to validate information before we can process an application which will hopefully result in the care worker being paid directly.
Applicants have ticked a box to say they authorize us to contact their HR Manager for information; if you are still unsure, please talk directly to the member of staff who has made the application as we are unable to disclose any details.
We ask for specific information from you:
| What we need to know | Things to note | Why we need this information |
| Your establishment/ organisation’s Companies House Registration number | This is different to your CQC location i.d. and you may need to refer to someone else in your organisation to get this information for us | This so that we can verify that your organisation is a care provider
|
| Whether the applicant is currently employed with your company and, if so, how many hours they’re contracted to work per week | This helps us work out how much funding we may be able to award them
|
|
| We ask if you’re aware of the Infection Control Fund (if you’re in England) or the Coronavirus Social Care Staff Support Fund (In Scotland) | ENGLAND: The Infection Control Fund (ICF) information
SCOTLAND: Coronovirus Social Care Staff Support Fund information |
We need to collect this data so we can identify which local authorities are using this funding to support staff
|
| We ask if you’re using the above or any other funding to support staff who are isolating in order to check whether the applicant meets our criteria | If they are on full pay or furloughed then they won’t be eligible for our funding
|
|
| We ask if the applicant has had to isolate due to Covid-19 and if so, for you to provide the dates of their absence
|
If they’ve had more than one period of isolation, please include dates of all absences | This information is key to validating what the applicant has told us and helps us determine if they meet the criteria |
- Please respond to our request within 3 working days; we know you’re very busy, but many of our applicants are desperate so the quicker we hear from you the faster we can process their application
- Please respond if we ask you to send us the required information from the organisation’s email address – we can’t verify information which is sent from a personal email address such as gmail or similar.
- Please do not leave any questions blank – we’ve kept the information required as short as possible and will need to contact you if you’ve not answered all the questions
Thank you for your help!