We’ve applied to the UK Space Agency for £69,914 to do some really cool work creating space-based coding challenges for 16-18 year olds. Fingers crossed.
Some notes on the process:
- The fund was this one: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/space-for-all-fund-2023. We’ve got a project plan that we think can boost A-level engagement with STEM. I’m quite excited about it because it involves both Open Source projects and education.
- We sometimes have a professional grant-writer work with us on bids (I enjoy working with them, and they’ve been successful on one of four bids they wrote for us, which covered their costs) – we don’t use them every time partly because they are busy but also because I want to be regularly writing bids myself and developing that skill in-house.
- For this project, partly as a training exercise, I put together a full Theory of Change and a Logframe, which you can see below. I always do this slightly resentfully (this isn’t the space/time to expand on why Theories of Change and Logframes don’t suit organisations of our size or that develop projects the way we do), but there’s no doubt that lots of funders have a logframe mindset, and I need to be able to talk to them in that language.
- I will admit that after we did the logframe and Theory of Change, the application form itself, which was written by people who think in this way, was relatively simple but we won’t know if this was a good idea until we find out if the bid was accepted.
The Theory of change looks like this: