Low success rate for Wellcome’s public engagement scheme

Only 4 per cent of proposals were funded under the latest round of the Wellcome Trust’s Public Engagement Fund, with the charity saying that many unsuccessful bids were not in line with its strategy or lacked convincingly meaningful outcomes.

Wellcome said on 25 April that a review of the fund by the Institute of Voluntary Action Research showed that in its latest round, for grants of between £25,000 and £250,000, just seven of 172 applications were successful.

“The other applications weren’t successful because they didn’t convince us that that they would create meaningful outcomes for the people they involved or because they didn’t clearly align with our strategy,” said Alexandra Parsons, Wellcome’s funding and activities adviser, on the trust’s website.