Community and Shared Transport: Large Grants

This funding round aims to make an immediate impact by awarding funding to develop, expand and improve community transport options for disabled people. 

Medium and large-scale community transport operators can apply for funding to support the delivery of community transport. Requests can include the costs for staff, vehicles, associated running costs, MiDAS training etc.

Value: £150,000 to £1 million

Duration: 1 to 3 years

Deadline: 23 December 2025

How much funding is available?

We’re awarding grants through this funding round from £150,000 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 £750,000 in total over three years, which would be £250,000 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 that improves access to community transport services for disabled people. This includes:   

Dial-a-Ride services   
Volunteer car schemes    
Non-emergency patient transport   
If you're a school considering an application, please contact us directly before submitting an EOI.

What your grant can be used for 

Your grant can be used for:

Funding for schemes, programmes and initiatives that already exist, and provide best practice solutions, but need support to remain operational or scale up the service they provide to help more disabled people. 
Staff and volunteer training or costs. 
Funding to increase the number of vehicles available to help. organisations support disabled people access the wider community. 
Full cost recovery grants which include indirect costs.

Your grant cannot be used for:

Shuttle services – refer to the use of a vehicle exclusively for transporting members of the applicant organisation solely between two designated venues for example, from the organisation’s primary facility to a specific event location. These services are limited to internal use and do not extend to providing transportation within the broader community.
Overseas travel.  
Construction projects and / or building works.   
Activities or services unrelated to transport for disabled people. 
Social investment or venture philanthropy. 
Sponsorship for any individual, group or company. 
Medical care or medical research.

Who your project or service can support

Grant funding must be used to support disabled people living in the UK.

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

We're particularly interested in applications from DDPOs (Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations), and funding projects or services that deliver meaningful impact in deprived areas, or to underrepresented groups.

Who can apply

We can accept applications for funding if your organisation has been active for at least three years and is one of the following:

Incorporated Charity
Company Limited by Guarantee
Community Interest Company (CIC)
Community Benefit Society

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 organisation

Please only apply to the funding round that fits most closely with your service 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 or service,
who it will help,
why this project or service is important,
the difference the project or service will make, and
how much money you think your project or service 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 or services 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 or service to start,
how your project or service will be delivered, and
about any new staff roles your project or service 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.

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

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.

If you were previously unsuccessful and would like to reapply with a similar project or service, 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.

Our monitoring reports can be accessed and completed through our online application form.

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

Performance overview - a concise summary of your project’s or service's performance over the reporting period, including a brief reflection on how well the project or service 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 or service.
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.

External evaluations

We recognise how important it is for organisations to be able to evidence that their work delivers a real impact for disabled people.

Robust evidence puts organisations in a stronger fundraising position and allows them to better advocate for the people they support.

Any grant we award for more than £750,000 will include funding for an external evaluation of the project or service.

To help with carrying out an external evaluation we have produced a set of evaluation FAQs.

If you have any questions or concerns about commissioning an external evaluation on your project or service, please reach out to your Grant Manager who may be able to put you in touch with our Monitoring and Evaluation team.