Code of ethical conduct
Our work is driven by two fundamental ethical principles: doing good, and doing no harm.
What you can expect from us:
What we expect of you:
We expect all funded organisations to exercise ethical principles of governance and delivery in line with Section 4 of the Charity Code of Governance (external link).
Together, these strands form our Code of Ethical Conduct for the way we work and our relationship with you.
We don't waste your time:
We offer both a basic eligibility checker and detailed information about eligibility for specific programmes in their guidance: if you can’t meet these, we’re not the funder for your project.
If it shows you could be eligible, you’ll then need to read the detailed guidance for the specific programme you want to apply for, to see if it’s right for your project.
We give clear information about the outcomes each funding programme is seeking to achieve, the data you’ll need to provide to us for a grant funded with public money, and on your project’s responsibilities to build the evidence of ‘what works’ for the Ministry of Defence and the Covenant Team.
We encourage the stated use of AI to help you complete your application form as this can save you lots of time; in future programme guidance, we’ll offer template prompts you might use to ask AI to summarise or refine project or organisational information you’ve provided.
We ask relevant questions:
We keep our application form as simple as we can, and for more complex programmes we’ll often use a two-stage process so that you can do a simpler, shorter form first which allows us to filter out any proposals which are clearly not eligible, to save you time. We’ll only ask you what we need to know to assess your project for public funding. If you’re successful, the data we’ll ask you for to evidence the outcomes of your work and the demographics of the beneficiaries you’ve supported will be set out clearly to you. We see every grant we make as part of the public research project that is the Covenant Fund: mutual learning and spreading what works are at the heart of this.
We accept risk:
We trust grant partners to spend their funds and deliver their work wisely and well. Trustees assess the risks of every grant programme for public money and balance different levels of risk in accordance with the outcomes we’re seeking. We expect all the organisations we fund to exercise ethical principles of governance and delivery in line with the Charity Code of Governance.
We act with urgency:
We publish and stick to our timetables for funding programmes (sometimes, when we are distributing other funds for government departments, timescales will be set by them). We make and communicate decisions as quickly as we can.
We're open:
Our programmes are designed to meet the stated outcomes of our grantmaking strategy, which is set every three years with direction from the Ministry of Defence’s Covenant team and our sponsor minister, informed by independent evidence review and lived experience from consultation with the armed forces community. As a government grant-maker, we are required to meet Government’s functional standard GovS 015.
We assess every eligible application against the information in the programme’s guidance document, so that each has an equal chance of receiving funding. We may need to seek further information from you. Information is presented in a standard format for decision-making. Before it goes to our trustees, the information is moderated to check for consistency of approach across the portfolio of proposals, so that you can be confident of a fair assessment no matter who handles your application.
Our Board of Trustees then considers all applications and awards funding based on the national picture of need, project type and funding available. They include representatives from the Devolved Administrations as well as military subject matter experts. We publish the minutes of all board meetings.
We provide all applicants with clear and constructive feedback, as well as a copy of your assessment report for transparency. You may have the chance to strengthen your application and reapply to a later round – or there may be an opportunity to apply to another of our funding programmes.
We publish details of all of our grants and information on the outcomes of every programme. You’ll also find all of our grants in the national GrantNav tool.
We're flexible:
We make our funding as flexible as we can whilst still meeting the requirements of public funds. We enable grant partners to be flexible in response to changing needs and priorities, and we’ll tell you how to manage this with us at grant offer stage.
We communicate with purpose:
We are realistic about time commitments and we will make sure our communication with you is positive and purposeful. We consider our funding as a partnership with you.
We're proportionate:
We will be as light-touch as we can be for reporting, whilst still meeting evaluation requirements for publicly-funded grants. We will communicate our formal reporting requirements to you clearly and will make those processes as easy as we can, working with grant partners to continue improving this.
We also make sure that:
- Your application and our grant relationship will be managed in line with our team values of fairness, inclusivity and collaboration
- Outcomes and impact of our programmes will be empirically assessed
- Our approach to ethics in all aspects of our work is advised by an external panel to provide independent challenge and scrutiny.
Other information on ethics:
You’ll find information about ethics in our research in our published reports.
As non-departmental public body, we’re also required to meet the seven principles of public life (external link).
Our ethical approach is reflected in our values as an organisation and how we work.
