Support for Hospices
The MCF has a long-standing, £600,000 per year partnership with Hospice UK, working in England, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which has two main components:
ANNUAL GRANT PROGRAMME
An annual grant programme on a specific theme each year which provides one-off project grants to hospices. This is administered by Hospice UK and you can read more about this programme here: https://www.hospiceuk.org/innovation-hub/support-for-your-role/grants/masonic-charitable-foundation-hospice-grants
A list of the grants we have awarded through our Hospice UK partnership are here: https://www.hospiceuk.org/innovation-hub/support-for-your-role/grants/reports-lists/masonic-charitable-foundation
MCF BURSARY SCHEME
The MCF bursary scheme is designed to tackle the problem of staff retention in the Hospice sector and provides bursaries to support hospice staff with education and training opportunities. Bursaries of up to £1,700 are available to eligible individuals whose hospices are members of Hospice UK.
You can see the type of work this partnership is funding here:
Home-Start UK
On average, one in three children start primary school without reaching a good level of development. This figure rises to one in two with regard to poorer children*. The issues causing the most concern for teachers are communication and language, physical, personal, social and emotional development, literacy and numeracy.
Home-Start UK has a local community network of trained volunteers and expert support workers across England and Wales. It helps disadvantaged families with young children through their early years up to the age of five years old.
This £1 million five-year partnership works with local Home-Start branches to get children from disadvantaged backgrounds school-ready.
*Department for Education, Early years foundation stage profile results
The Cranfield Trust
The two-year £228,000 partnership with the Cranfield Trust links highly skilled volunteers with 60 frontline welfare charities and organisations to provide essential consultancy and mentoring services. The partnership provides tailored professional support to meet the needs of smaller charities and as a result, local communities will benefit from even better charity services.
The partnership has also funded a research report into the training needs of small to medium sized charities and you can read more about this here:
https://www.cranfieldtrust.org/pages/charity-management-matters
The Duke of Edinburgh Award
Young people with physical or learning difficulties are often excluded from adventurous activities due to a lack of accessible equipment, facilities, trained support staff and funding. This £300,000 partnership enables the Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) Award to reach at least 30,000 young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) by 2024. The ambition is to increase the number of centres, such as schools and youth groups, offering DofE to young people with SEND and train hundreds of Leaders – trained individuals supporting groups of young people through their DofE journeys.
The programme has been designed to make DofE participation possible for students with diverse difficulties and disabilities. It helps the students to build crucial personal life skills, develop employability skills and become more independent, and aims to offer students the same experiences available to their peers in mainstream education.
You can see the type of work this partnership is funding here:
Medical Research
The MCF has been funding medical research for many years, with the primary aim of improving knowledge, treatment and services for people with life-changing diseases and illnesses.
Recognizing that early-career research is often under-funded, the MCF focusses its medical research programme on funding PhD studentships, which we hope will help create the next generation of research experts and scientists.
We have supported research into a range of diseases including Prostate cancer, Motor Neurone Disease, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and many more.
Our medical research programme is invitation only; our current focus is childhood diseases and conditions.