Building a Resilient Community and Shared Transport Sector 

This funding round is for organisations that are looking to deliver something innovative related to shared community transport, which has the potential to either be replicated elsewhere, or develop a tool that can be of benefit to other providers.  

Value: £50,000 to £1 million

Duration: 1 to 3 years

Deadline: 30 January 2026

How much funding is available?

We’re awarding grants through this funding round from £50,000 to £1 million over a period of up to three years.  

Your application can be for one, two or three years' funding. For example, you could apply for £300,000 in total over three years, which would be £100,000 per year.  

If your organisation currently receives a community transport grant from the Motability Foundation, please speak with your Grant Manager before applying.

What we fund

We are awarding funding to organisations working in ways that can demonstrate best practice and ways of working that have the potential to build a sustainable, stronger more resilient community and shared transport sector. This might include: 

New operating models.
Shared infrastructure.
Collaborative approaches.
Digital transformation.
Enhancing volunteer capacity.

What your grant cannot be used for 

Overseas travel.   
Construction projects and / or building works.   
Activities or services unrelated to transport for disabled people. 
Sponsorship for any individual, group or company. 
Medical care or medical research.

Who your project can support

Grant funding must be used to support disabled people living in the UK and creating a more sustainable and resilient community and shared transport.

Projects can provide support on a national scale or focus on specific regions, addressing local needs and challenges.

We're particularly interested in funding projects that deliver meaningful impact in deprived areas, or to underrepresented groups.

Who can apply

We're particularly interested in applications from DDPOs (Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations), charities and not-for-profit organisations, community transport operators, social enterprises, research and innovation bodies.

We cannot accept applications from:

Unincorporated Associations
Statutory Bodies, Hospitals or Health Authorities
Companies Limited by Shares
Organisations from outside the UK
Individuals
Sole Traders
Political pressure groups, or organisations primarily engaged in political activity
Projects or services that proselytise a specific ethical or religious belief, and/or exclude individuals that do not hold a specific belief

If you are unable to complete an expression of interest and / or application form online, you can share your accessible communication requirements with us. We’re always happy to talk about other ways for you to tell us about your idea.

Governance and finances

To be considered for funding, your organisation’s Board must:

be made up of at least three members, and
the majority of Board members must be unrelated to each other.

Applicant organisations should have:

an annual income of at least £50,000 for each of the last three financial years. This is assessed against accounts filed with the relevant regulator. We cannot accept management accounts as evidence of this.
free reserves equivalent to at least three months’ worth of unrestricted expenditure at the point of application.

We also ask that your organisation holds the following policies and keeps them regularly updated. Copies of these will need to be submitted as part of the application process:

Safeguarding policy
Whistleblowing policy
Equal Opportunities policy

What you need to do

1. Check that this funding round is the best fit for your project

Please only apply to the funding round that fits most closely with your project and the amount of funding you need to deliver it. We only consider one application during a funding round.

If you are unsure which funding round to apply to, please contact us.

2. Submit an expression of interest (EOI)

Our EOI application form will ask you about:

your project,
who it will help,
why this project is important,
the difference the project will make, and
how much money you think your project will need.

We’ll also ask you to provide these documents:

your Safeguarding policy,
your latest published annual report and accounts, and
your governing document.

Complete your EOI using our online application form.

You will be asked to create an account and login.
You can save a draft and access updates.
To help you we’ve created EOI sample questions.

3. Complete a full application

If your EOI was successful, you'll be invited to submit a full application using our online application form with the same login details you previously registered.

The full application form will ask you:

about the outcomes, outputs, and indicators in your logframe. A logframe is a tool to help people who design projects to think logically about outcomes, outputs, activities and indicators. To help you we have created some guidance around completing a logframe (PDF 1.6 MB). To assess the impact of our funding, we require all applicants to include specific indicators in their logframe. These can be found on the first tab of our indicator menu spreadsheet (XLSX 32.7 KB).

when you’d like your project to start,
how your project will be delivered, and
about any new staff roles your project will involve.

We’ll also ask you to provide these documents:

copies of published annual reports and accounts for the last three years,
your latest available management accounts,
your Whistleblowing policy, and
your Equal Opportunities policy.

We’ve created full application sample questions and a budget template spreadsheet (XLSX 26.1 KB) to support with your application.

What we will do

1. We will review your EOI

Once you’ve submitted an EOI we aim to get back to you within four weeks.

If you’re successful, we will then invite you to complete a full application.

If you're unsuccessful, we will always try and provide some level of feedback but, due to the large number of applications we receive each year, we cannot always provide detailed feedback, or a follow-up call about every application.

Log back into your online application account to submit your full application.

2. We will carry out checks on your full application

To successfully make a difference, we need to support organisations with the best chance of delivering meaningful impact for disabled people.

Checks carried out under our due diligence framework cover the following six key areas:

governance,
finances,
management,
reputation,
applicant capability, and
proposal feasibility.

We aim to speak to all organisations that submit applications to us, to understand as much as possible about them, and how they support disabled people.

If anything is identified as part of our checks that gives us cause for concern, we may contact you to try and resolve them.

However if our decision to not accept your application is based on the findings of these checks, then we aim to outline our concerns when you are informed of our decision.

3. Make a decision on your full application

All decisions are made by a panel of staff at the Motability Foundation with both knowledge of grant making, and either direct or indirect experience of the transport challenges faced by disabled people.

Help with your application

We have created a set of guidance documents and sample questions to support you with completing our expression of interest and / or a full application form online:

Monitoring and evaluation: logframe guidance (PDF 1.6 MB).
Indicator menu spreadsheet (XLSX 32.7 KB): contains mandatory indicators and examples of indicators to support with creating your logframe.
EOI and full application sample questions.
Budget template spreadsheet (XLSX 26.1 KB).

If you're unable to complete our application forms online, you can share your accessible communication requirements with us.

For this or any other questions on our application process, please contact us.

If your full application is not successful

We aim to provide all applicant organisations with meaningful feedback where their application is unsuccessful.

We ask that unsuccessful applicants do not reapply under the same funding round for at least three months following a decision.

If you were previously unsuccessful and would like to reapply with a similar project, please contact us. We may be able to provide feedback to inform your application.

If your full application is successful

Your Grant Manager will get in touch with you to let you know the good news as soon as possible.

We will then send out a grant agreement for you to sign. This is made up of two sections:

The first is specific to your organisation and will be based on the content of your application, so please make sure this is correct, and all targets are achievable.
The second section is the same for every organisation we fund. See an example of one of our grant agreements within our terms and conditions document (PDF 1.0 MB).

Tracking your progress

We ask all organisations we fund to provide us with updates on how their grant is progressing. This is important as it allows us to ensure that our funding is driving positive change and reaching those who need it most.

Funded organisations are asked to complete a brief six-month monitoring report, and a slightly longer annual monitoring report. Both will include a section on how you are progressing against the targets outlined in your logframe.

In certain circumstances, we may ask organisations to provide us with updates more frequently than twice a year. If this applies to you, then your Grant Manager will let you know.

Our monitoring reports can be accessed and completed through our online application form and will be available after funding has been granted.

Our annual monitoring report will ask you to let us know how your project is progressing and includes the following:

Performance overview - a concise summary of your project’s performance over the reporting period, including a brief reflection on how well the project has progressed against your original plans and targets.
Learning and reflections - an opportunity to tell us about any significant achievements, challenges or proposed changes you might wish to make.
Indicators - you will be asked to report on each indicator within your logframe, mutually agreed at the start of your grant.
Case studies - we encourage you to share short, anonymised case studies that demonstrate the impact of your work and illustrate the benefits of your project.
Financial - submit a detailed summary of your grant expenditure to date, comparing it to the budget you submitted as part of your original application. These reports are intended to track progress and highlight areas that may require attention or adjustments.