About the work
Hospice UK is the national charity for hospice and end of life care, based in London and working across all four UK nations. It’s a membership organisation for around 200 local hospices. It supports them with guidance, training and advocacy, and works to make sure everyone affected by death, dying and bereavement gets the care and support they need. It also runs Dying Matters, its national campaign to open up honest conversations about death, dying and grief, including the annual Dying Matters Awareness Week.
In 2021 Hospice UK asked Always Possible to help it set up a new Dying Matters Community Grants Programme. The idea was to fund creative, community-led projects, such as exhibitions, small theatre productions and book groups, that get people talking about death in everyday settings rather than clinical ones. With a modest £20,000 pot, it needed every grant to count. It also had to balance its own hospice members with the arts and community groups it wanted to reach.
We ran a workshop with Hospice UK’s communications and engagement team to stress-test the plan. We tightened the framing, eligibility criteria and grant sizes so the programme would attract the right applications, not thousands of the wrong ones. We then researched and built a bank of contacts and gatekeepers to help the scheme reach beyond the usual healthcare networks. Finally, we turned it all into a “now, next and later” plan for launch, delivery and legacy, along with a template due diligence questionnaire.
The programme launched in November 2021. It has since become a regular part of Hospice UK’s Dying Matters work.
“The Dying Matters grants project have really become a successful annual piece of work, thanks again for your support with setting it up.”
Charlie King – Deputy Director of External Affairs, Hospice UK
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