Our impact
The Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust (the Trust) seeks to fund real change that supports Armed Forces communities. Understanding the impact of the work that we support has a number of benefits.
- It ensures that our funding programmes made a real difference to veterans, Armed Forces families and the wider Armed Forces community.
- By using learning from existing funding programmes, it helps us to run stronger and more effective programmes in future.
- Understanding the impact of their work can help the projects that we support to become more sustainable.
- We can share learning and good practice ideas from projects that have made a big difference.
Browse our impact section below to learn more about the different ways the Trust explores its impact upon the Armed Forces community and the impact of the programmes we deliver.
Evaluating the impact of the Trust
Each year, the Trust produces an Annual Report, detailing what we have achieved in support of the Armed Forces community and what our plans are for the year to come. In addition to our main Annual Report, the Trust produces a summary report of the Armed Forces Covenant Fund each year.
Click to access these reports and find our more about what we do.
Evaluating the impact of Trust funded programmes
The Trust conducts and commissions evaluations on a number of our funding programmes to discover more about the impact they have had. We place great importance on such evaluations as they help us discover best practice and consider what more can be done, including any next steps for the future.
Click here to find out more and read the latest published reports
The Northern Hub for Veterans and Families Research at Northumbria University used funding from Covenant Fund to develop a map of veterans’ and their families’ welfare needs across the whole of the UK.
This is called the Map of Need and is based on data from public sources, statistics, health data and data directly from Armed Forces charities.
Increasingly, the Trust conducts consultations with our community to ensure the programmes we wish to run are relevant – meeting specified needs and based on what the Armed Forces community identifies as a current challenge.
The Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust occasionally makes very large grants through specialist programmes designed to address a specific need.
In 2016, The Covenant Fund ran a programme to make a single, transformational grant to see if a one-stop resource could be developed in order to signpost veterans to the best source of support for their needs. We received a number of interesting bids and, through a two-stage application process that explored how the project would be run, viability and sustainability, we awarded a £2M grant to a consortium of charities led by the Royal British Legion, for a two-year pilot.
We were delighted that the Veterans’ Gateway launched in 2017 to be the first point of contact for veterans seeking support.
The Gateway put veterans and their families in touch with the organisations best placed to help with the information, advice and support they need – from healthcare and housing to employability, finances, personal relationships and more.
Our initial funding for the pilot enabled the service to be established and we awarded an additional £100,000 through our Impact programme, to fund an evaluation so that the project is well supported to move to the future.
Our Impact programme also supported another major transformational project, the Map of Need.
With an initial grant from us of £500,000, they have developed a map of veterans and their families’ welfare needs across the whole of the UK, based on data from public sources, statistics, health data and data directly from Armed Forces charities.
We also awarded additional funding to expand the Map of Need to include data relating to Armed Forces families.