Another £10m to wing its way to good causes in Shetland

December 3rd 2025

Shetland Charitable Trust has awarded over £10 million in grants for next year to support 32 valued community services. The Large Grant Scheme has increased its payout by £1m over the past two years.

The largest recipient is Shetland Recreational Trust which has a sprawling complex of eight leisure centres, swimming pools and other sports facilities to run across the islands. It will receive £3.8m.

A grant of £1.82m goes to enhance the standard of community care that Shetland residents receive from Shetland Islands Council.

The two other organisations to receive more than £1m are Shetland Amenity Trust (SAT) and Shetland Arts Development Agency (SADA). SAT has a wide range of services in the heritage and culture worlds to fund with its £1.34m grant award while SADA will spend just over £1.1m to cover the arts from dance to drama, film, music and crafts.

The full list of grant awards is included below.

Ability Shetland gets funds increased to £120,000 in core funding to help continue delivering its groups, clubs and outreach services.

A new grant of £30,000 will also help the group support a sports development support worker role. It is one of four new grant awards for 2026/27, totalling £73,500. The others are:

£17,500 to UHI Shetland for running online skills training to help people with numeracy.
£15,000 to Scalloway Youth and Community Centre to strengthen the organisation and help fund staff costs.
£11,000 to the Shetland branch of Relationship Scotland to help people dealing with the after-effects of conflict or trauma.

Confirming next year’s awards, the chair of SCT’s trustees, Robert Leask, said: “We are fortunate as a community to have these funds. The £10 million is money well spent on the huge amount of effort that goes into making life in Shetland a little bit better for everyone.”

SCT is helping organisations plan ahead and have a more certain future by offering annual grant funding in principle until 2030.

Testimonials

The funding COPE Ltd receives from the Shetland Charitable Trust supports us in many ways. It allows us to develop and maintain a strong foundation to our core business and assists us to provide on-going employment skill development opportunities to people with disabilities living within Shetland. COPE Ltd highly values the support provided to our organisation by The Shetland Charitable Trust.

“The substantial grant made to us by Shetland Charitable Trust every year allows us to provide first-class facilities and dedicated staff to underpin sporting success among people of all ages and abilities in the islands.”

Having this core funding from the Charitable Trust means that we can use that money where we need it at any given time. It's multi-year funding which really takes the pressure off. To have the funding to keep going is really important as it is improving the lives of disabled folk in Shetland.

The funding that we get from the Charitable Trust pays for part of staff support and matching with other funders. Without local funders we wouldn't have national funders, and without either of those funders, we wouldn't be able to do this, so funding from the Shetland Charitable Trust is incredibly important.

The funding Shetland Arts gets from Shetland Charitable Trust is about making sure the organisation can thrive, access other funds, and deliver on behalf of the community of Shetland. Our funding from the Shetland Charitable Trust really helps us with our conversations with national funders because it shows that we're working on behalf of what the local objectives and priorities are.

The Access to Leisure scheme was introduced to allow folk to be able to get access to classes and activities for a lower cost. I feel that the SRT play a critical role in every community across Shetland and that's all down to the funding of the Shetland Charitable Trust that we're able to maintain that.

Unpaid carers do an amazing job looking after people 24/7 in their own homes, keeping them living at home safely, and they really need help to do that. Thanks to the funding from Shetland Charitable Trust, we've been able to employ a deputy manager, recruit more care attendants, and provide overnights. We're also really grateful for the funding because it means that everybody can get the service for free.