5. Expedition funding
There are many, many organizations who can provide funding for overseas exploration. These can usefully be divided into about a dozen categories:
(i) Companies who fund conservation work on a large scale, e.g. BP;
(ii) Companies who might be able to provide goods in kind, e.g. airlines;
(iii) Companies who are interested in commercializing what you might find, e.g. bioprospecting companies;
(iv) Charities for whom funding overseas exploration is a principal aim, e.g. the Royal Geographical Society (RGS);
(v) Educational charities who fund expeditions as part of their remit to further education, e.g. the Gilchrist Educational Trust;
(vi) Scientific charities who fund overseas exploration by undergraduates to encourage people in their field of scientific enquiry, e.g. the British Ecological Society;
(vii) Conservation charities who fund research which will benefit conservation knowledge of habitats, ecosystems, or species, e.g. Flora & Fauna International and the People’s Trust for Endangered Species;
(viii) Local charities, and sometimes local authorities, who help people from your area of the UK (or wherever) to travel overseas for worthwhile purposes (e.g. the Doris Field Charitable Trust for people from Oxfordshire);
(ix) Funding bodies set up to promote the study of a particular area, e.g. the Trapnell Fund of Oxford University, which funds fieldwork in Africa & Madagascar.
(x) Funding bodies which work to support particular groups within society, e.g.the French Huguenot Charitable Trust of London (for Huguenots) or the Henrietta Hutton fund (administered by the RGS, for young women at Oxford).
(xi) Funding bodies set up as a memorial to someone, e.g the Mike Soper & Jimmy Eliot Memorial Fund of the Department of Plant Sciences, Oxford University. These are usually very generous, but there are often strict eligibilty criteria.
How to find them
We cannot do better than the Royal Geographical Society, who have a chapter dedicated to funding in their Expeditions Handbook here, and who also provide a wonderful (and also free) Directory of Grant Giving Organizations.
Oxford Specific Funds
Details of a couple of additional sources in Oxford are available below (to be updated soon), and a “standard letter” to give you a template to start from in writing out of the blue to organizations without an application form is available here.
Mike Soper & Jimmy Elliott Fund
Administered by the Department of Plant Sciences: deadline usually the Friday before Trinity Term begins.
Trapnell Fund
The Trapnell Fund is a small fund that occasionally supports biological fieldwork in Africa, set up with money from one of the founders of OUEC. Grants of up to approximately £5000 for support of field-based research concerned with the African environment can be awarded, but the fund is not intended to support research which is mainly anthropological or sociological in nature. It usually supports postgraduate work but will also support undergraduate work: write for details to Mrs J. Brown, University Offices, Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JD, as early as possible in the year, as the final deadline for completed applications is usually the end of February.
Timothy Bailey Trust
Relatively recent and generous: set up to honour the memory of an Oxford biology graduate in a particularly appropriate way.
The Oxford University Society
The Oxford University Society (the University’s Alumni association) administers a grant each year specifically for Oxford University approved expeditions, which have helped many groups in the past few years (see archive). The average award amount is £500. They also offer grants specifically for individual students from East Kent, Hertfordshire and Dorset.
Doris Field Charitable Trust
An Oxfordshire-based general-purposes charity that has been known to give money to Oxford expeditions, and is more likely to if you have at least one expedition member who grew up in Oxfordshire. Write to: Doris Field Charitable Trust, c/o Morgan Cole, Buxton Court, 3 West Way, Oxford, OX2 0SZ. The Trustees meet only twice a year, so try and write as early as possible to get hold of the application form.
Departments and Colleges
It’s also always worth asking in the department whose area of study is closest to what you intend to study whether there are any funds to help expeditions lying around, and JCRs and colleges themselves very often have travel awards - usually administered by the office of the head of the college - the Master/Warden/Provost/President.
