Bids are invited once a year for grants to be used to support projects that can be shown to offer a broad strategic benefit to the University, but that do not form part of the normal day-to-day operations of a department and would not easily be funded from other regular sources. From 2020, bids will usually be invited in Hilary Term.
Grants to applicants from within the University are usually in the region of £2,000 - £12,000, either given as a one-off award, or spread over two or three years. Grants are also available to organisations external to the University; in such cases, the amount awarded are usually lower and there is a cap on the total amount of funding made available to external organisations in any given bidding round. The cap is currently £25,000. Certain such projects, which would more appropriately be supported from the University's Community Grants Scheme, will be advised to apply to that fund.
The most recent invitation to bid, in February 2023, attracted fourteen applications. Grants awarded recently have included support for:
- The Ibadan-Oxford Stroke Project - a project centred on improving the provision of stroke care in Nigeria by the creation of a Stroke Unit at the Ibadan University Hospital and initiating a programme of educational exchange visits and virtual teaching between Ibadan and Oxford;
- Working in Partnership with Students - a project which sets out to gain an in-depth understanding of disabled students' experience with the University's new approach to creating, communicating and implementing Student Support Plans to develop a more structured approach to making reasonable adjustment recommendations for disabled students;
- Pusey House Library Post-1820 Monograph Cataloguing Project - to create online catalogue records for 29,000 post-1820 monographs in the Library's collection, increasing research potential and improving the ability to search and navigate the collections efficiently.