By Vedat Mizrahi, Co-founder · 11 June 2026

How we check a grant is actually open (and why funding databases get it wrong)

I want to start with the most expensive thing in small-charity fundraising. It isn't a subscription, or a consultant's day rate. It's the week you spend writing an application for a fund that was never going to read it — because the programme quietly closed, changed, or was never really open in the first place.

If you've run fundraising for a small or mid-sized charity, you know the feeling. You find a promising listing. The amounts fit, the cause fits, the geography fits. You brief your trustees, gather your budget figures, draft your case for support. Then, somewhere in the small print of the funder's own website, you find the line the listing didn't mention: the deadline passed months ago, or the fund now works by invitation only. The hours are gone, and they were hours you didn't have.

I'm Vedat Mizrahi, co-founder of GrantNest, and this post is about why that keeps happening — and what we do differently.

The staleness problem, with names attached

Funding databases and search summaries mostly work by collecting information once and recirculating it. The trouble is that funders change their programmes all the time, and the copies don't keep up. This isn't a hypothetical. Here are four examples we verified ourselves, on the funders' own websites, in early June 2026.

• Henry Smith. The Henry Smith Charity rebranded as the Henry Smith Foundation (now at henrysmith.foundation) and replaced its old main grant programmes under a new 2025–2030 strategy. Weeks later, aggregator sites were still listing the old "Improving Lives £20k–£60k" and "Strengthening Communities £20k–£70k" bands — programmes that no longer exist in that form. We verified this on 7 June 2026.
• Comic Relief. When we checked on 7 June 2026, Comic Relief's own funding page said, verbatim: "There are currently no live funding opportunities." Web summaries at the same time suggested otherwise. If you'd trusted the summary, you'd have gone looking for an application form that wasn't there.
• Lloyds Bank Foundation for England & Wales. Some aggregator copy describes their funding as "continuously open". Their own funding page, checked on 7 June 2026, says the next open round launches in July 2026, and that their current 2026 investments are made by direct invitation. There is nothing a charity can openly apply to today — whatever the third-party copy says.
• Paul Hamlyn Foundation. A web-search summary told us the Ideas & Pioneers Fund was open. The actual source page says its 2025 deadline has passed. We verified that on 8 June 2026. (Paul Hamlyn does have funds genuinely open right now — but not that one.)

Four well-known, well-run funders. Four cases where the second-hand version of the truth had drifted from the first-hand one. And these are just the examples we happened to document in two days of checking. None of this is the funders' fault — they keep their own pages accurate. The drift happens in the copies.

How we check

Our rule is simple, and we'd rather it sounded boring than clever: nothing goes in our list as "open" unless the funder's own page says so.

In practice, that means three things for every open call we list:

• It links to the funder's own page — not to our summary of it, not to a third-party listing. The page where the funder themselves describes the programme and how to apply.
• It carries a last-checked date. You can see exactly when a human-supervised check last confirmed the programme was open. If that date is old, you know to treat the entry with more caution — we'd rather show you the date than pretend everything is permanently fresh.
• "Open" means the funder said open. If a funder's page says a programme is by invitation, paused, or between rounds, we don't list it as open — even when that means our list is shorter. The Lloyds Bank Foundation example above is a fund we deliberately left out, because their own page told us to.

That last point matters more than it might seem. A funding list earns its keep by what it leaves out. Every entry that shouldn't be there costs a real charity real hours.

The honest bit: we can get it wrong too

I'm not going to claim we've solved staleness — that would be exactly the kind of overclaim this post is complaining about. Funders can change a page the day after we check it. A programme can close early because it's oversubscribed. A check, however careful, is a snapshot.

So here's the advice we give even our own users: before you start writing, open the funder's page and read it yourself. We make that as easy as we can — every entry links straight to the source, so confirming it takes one click and two minutes rather than an afternoon of searching. Our job is to get you to the right page with confidence; the final read is yours, and it should be.

And we will never tell you that a listing, however fresh, means you'll win. Nobody can promise that, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

If you'd like to see it in practice

We publish a free list of UK grant programmes that are genuinely open right now — each one verified on the funder's own page, dated, and linked to the source. No sign-up wall, no win-promises, just the list.

See the free list of verified-open UK grants — and if you spot something on it that's gone stale, tell us. We'll check it and fix it, because that's the whole point.