Comic Relief is best known for one night of television every two years, which does its grant-making no favours. Behind the telethon is a year-round funder running large multi-year programmes on poverty, injustice, climate and sport, plus a small-grants route built specifically for grassroots organisations that would never get near the big funds.
The two halves work so differently that it's worth deciding early which one you're applying to.
The community route: up to £5,000
The Community Fund is the accessible end. Grants of up to £5,000 are available to grassroots, community-led organisations in England with an income under £250,000, for project costs or core costs.
Three details do most of the filtering:
- Income under £250,000. This is a fund for small organisations, and the threshold is checked.
- Community-led. The people the work is for should be involved in running it, not just receiving it.
- Core costs are allowed. You do not have to invent a project to apply.
Rounds open and close, rather than running continuously. At the time of writing, a round is open with a closing date at the end of September 2026, which is the kind of window that is easy to miss if you're checking funder sites by hand.
The strategic funds
The larger side of Comic Relief is organised around long-running themes. Recent and current areas include:
Alleviating the consequences of poverty — work with people living on the lowest incomes, in the UK and internationally.
Tackling injustices — work with groups who are disproportionately affected by the systems around them.
Climate justice — projects that refuse the split between people and planet, usually led by the communities most exposed to climate harm.
Sport for change — using sport to reach people that clinical and social services struggle to engage, particularly on the basis of gender, ethnicity or age.
Pop culture for social change — a newer area in the UK, using culture and media as a route to social change rather than as promotion for it.
One point of confusion worth clearing up: the headline figures attached to these themes — £9.1 million here, £80 million there — are the size of the fund, not the size of a grant. They tell you how seriously Comic Relief takes the theme. They do not tell you what you can ask for. Individual awards are a small fraction of those totals, and the guidance for each round sets the real range.
Who can apply
For the Community Fund: constituted, community-led organisations in England under the income threshold. A bank account in the organisation's name, a governing document and a couple of unrelated trustees or committee members are the practical minimum.
For the strategic funds: charities and social-purpose organisations, often in partnership. These rounds are frequently open to consortia, and a strong single applicant with no partners can be at a disadvantage where the theme is explicitly about systems rather than services.
What Comic Relief is looking for
Lived experience in the room. Across both halves, the funder asks who is making the decisions and whether the people affected by the issue have real power in the organisation — not as a box to tick, but as something visible in your governance and staffing.
Work with the grain of a community. Comic Relief funds a lot of small, unglamorous, locally rooted delivery. You do not need to be innovative to be fundable here; you need to be trusted by the people you serve.
Honesty about what's hard. Applications that describe a straightforward problem with a straightforward fix tend to read as thin, particularly in the strategic funds where the themes exist precisely because the problems are stubborn.
Common reasons applications don't succeed
- Applying to the Community Fund over the £250,000 income threshold
- Applying from outside the geography a particular round covers — several funds are England-only, and others are UK-wide or international
- Quoting a fund's total size as the amount requested
- A strategic-fund application from an organisation with no track record on that theme
- Missing the round: these are windows, not rolling doors
How to apply
Each fund has its own application window, guidance and form on Comic Relief's site, and for some strategic programmes applications are handled through partner organisations rather than directly. Check who is actually administering the round before you start writing.
For the Community Fund, the form is short by design. Spend the time on being specific: who the organisation is for, what the £5,000 pays for, and what changes locally if you get it.
Finding Comic Relief funding on Grants Hub
Grants Hub tracks Comic Relief's open funds, including the Community Fund's closing dates, alongside 4,000+ live UK grants from 1,500+ funders across 100+ sources, updated daily. Rounds that open and close quickly are exactly what gets missed when you check funder sites by hand — and we take 0% commission on anything you win.