We love to hear your questions! We’ve tried to answer as many as possible here, but if you have more please drop us a line.

The Room’s annual membership is £1000. For those who are able and inspired to give more, higher donations to our grants fund are welcomed. Please visit our Membership page for more information. We also have a small number of matched memberships available at £500 (see below for more information).

The Room follows a collective philanthropy structure. Donations are pooled, funding is granted directly to local initiatives, and members are invited to play an active role in deciding where that money goes.

100% of your upfront membership donation goes into The Room’s grants fund. Our grants fund is held and administered by Prism the Gift Fund (see below) and is ringfenced for charitable grants to exceptional small charities supporting women, children and young people across Oxfordshire.

The Room is run by unpaid volunteers, which means our running costs are very low. This allows us to send 100% of your upfront donation directly to the grants fund, so your gift makes the maximum possible difference.

Any Gift Aid we receive on top of your membership donation helps cover our essential running costs – such as compliance and financial administration, printing, web hosting, insurance, and accounts.

If you’d like more detail about how we cover our expenses, we’d be very happy to share – just get in touch.

We recognise that £1000 is a meaningful amount of money. For many it may be the largest single charitable gift they have made. That’s why we make sure it has real impact. Through our collective giving model, your contribution becomes part of a major grant to your community. And we have a range of ways to support you along the way.

Membership donations can be paid upfront or in instalments. Please drop us a line if you’d like to donate in instalments contact@theroomoxford.org.

For more ways to get involved please visit our Membership page.

We’re delighted to offer a Matched Membership Scheme. You can join The Room through the scheme with a membership donation of £500, or support it by contributing £500 to help unlock a matched membership place. Each matched membership increases the total funding available for our grants, multiplying the impact of every contribution.

Memberships are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. To find out more, please email contact@theroomoxford.org.

We are grateful to our generous donors for making this scheme possible.

If you’re a UK taxpayer, please tick the Gift Aid box at the JustGiving checkout.
This allows us to claim an extra 25p for every £1 you donate, at no extra cost to you.

Higher rate tax payers:
If you pay tax at the higher or additional rate, you can also claim back the difference between your tax rate and the basic rate on your donation through your self-assessment tax return.

UK government guidance on gift aid and how to claim your tax rebate if you are a higher rate tax payer can be found here.

Absolutely! On our Membership form, please enter your name at the top and then put your partner or sponsor’s name in the box labelled “Payment name if different to member name.” When you proceed to the JustGiving donation page, you’ll be able to enter your partner or sponsor’s name and card details for the receipt.

Our grants process is informed by ongoing outreach conversations to establish current challenges and opportunities across the county as well the broader charity landscape and best funding practices. These findings contribute to the direction of our grants focus alongside member input at several stages.

We aim for a final shortlist of at least three partner charities, one of which (decided by members) will receive our large Impact Grant. The remaining charities receive smaller Investment Grants. All grants are unrestricted and we continue to support and platform all our partner charities.

We encourage any member who would like to see more of our grants process to join our Grants Team or sit in on a grants meeting.

You’re welcome to join any time. Our membership closes for a given cycle with our member vote in May and reopens for the new cycle shortly after.

We’re sensitive to the time restraints of small charities. With this in mind, our grants process has been written to be as human and respectful as possible. We encourage the charities we engage with to give us feedback on these processes.

Once we have awarded a grant, we keep a line of communication open to allow our Partner Charities to share updates and stories with The Room’s community. We include these updates in our seasonal newsletters and across our social media platforms and encourage grant recipients to share their wish lists with us so that we can share these with our members. We aim to further leverage our support by offering the time and talent of our member community where available.

Many of our supporters are actively involved in the charitable and community sector, and we see this as a strength – it reflects the commitment, experience and insight that The Room attracts. However, we take governance and independence seriously. All committee and board members are required to declare any actual or potential conflicts of interest. Where they have an affiliation with a charity eligible for consideration for a grant, they are required to recuse themselves fully from all discussions and decisions relating to that grant. This ensures that all funding is awarded fairly, transparently and in the best interests of The Room’s mission. A copy of our conflict of interest policy can be found here.

We love to hear of charities we may not have come across. If they fit our funding criteria then please do share them with us. If we aren’t already aware of them we will add them to our records and make sure they have appropriate visibility in the grants process.

The funds are held by Prism the Gift Fund (charity number 1099682). Prism was established in 2005 with the mission of increasing the flow of funds into the charitable sector by creating administrative efficiencies and is expert in administering the giving of groups of donors and established foundations.

At the end of our cycle, once our members have voted, The Room will instruct Prism to pay the grants to the charities chosen by members. Prism and The Room carry out due diligence on all finalist charities ahead of our member vote to ensure eligibility for funding and speed of payment.