Useful information for funders

This page is designed to bring together some of the key information that a funder may be looking for on our website. We hope that our website is well laid out and you can find relevant information, but this is the belt and braces approach.

Why We Exist

We campaign with communities, on behalf of all landscapes, from the countryside surrounding the places where most people live, to the wilder more remote ones. 

The quality of people’s surroundings is central to their well-being, and the quality of Scotland’s countryside is of fundamental importance even to those who spend most of their time in towns and cities.  We support communities and individuals to look after and make the most of their local landscapes and we believe that Scotland’s countryside is fundamental to addressing the climate emergency, reversing the nature crisis, and supporting livelihoods and resilient communities.

About us

There is a whole lot of information about us on our ‘About us’ webpage but here is a little extra info.

Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) is Scotland’s countryside charity. Since our founding nearly a century ago, we have worked to protect, enhance and promote Scotland’s countryside and rural landscapes for the benefit of everyone.

Our activities combine direct community support, campaigning, and policy influence. We help communities and grassroots groups to safeguard their local green spaces and biodiversity, particularly in Scotland’s Green Belts, which are the most accessible countryside for people in towns and cities. We recently increased our resource to expand our bespoke advice service, equip more people with the tools and confidence to navigate the planning system, expand our online resources, launch an annual webinar series and strengthen peer-to-peer community networks.

We use the insights from our direct experience of communities struggling with the planning system to inform our campaigning on policy and legislative reform. Our campaigning has secured national impact, from shaping Scotland’s approach to National Parks to advocating for a climate and nature-led planning system, and leading the campaign for a deposit return scheme. We respond directly to nationally significant planning cases where precedent-setting outcomes could affect national policies. 

As a tiny organisation, we need to work with others to achieve our aims. Our webinar series has been in collaboration with Planning Democracy, and we work very closely as a member of LINK, chairing a working group, and Scotland’s Climate Coalition (SCCS), where we are bringing together a joint comms approach to energy infrastructure, nature and communities. Other key partners are the communities and individuals working on issues on the ground, and we couldn’t achieve what we do without our specialist volunteers which include a historian, archive accessibility volunteer, evaluator, a data analysis volunteer and two people working on policy. They work between half and two days a week.

Planning is a difficult cause to engage people in, especially funders. Although the planning system affects everyone’s lives and has the potential to make deep, systemic change, it is often misunderstood and written off as ticking boxes. We are trying to show the transformative effect that involving people in the planning system has for communities, for nature and for climate. Working both to engage people at grassroots level to have a voice, and transform the system itself to listen to communities and build-in justice for those who often have the least voice.

Our Budget and funding needs

We are a very small organisation. Our last audited accounts show a turnover of around £129,000 and we have three part-time members of staff.

Our key need is for core funding to cover these staff who, along with our six volunteers, are vital for us delivering our work. Our membership and funding from appeals brings in around £18,000 a year, and small family trusts or grant making organisations account for about another £26,000 a year. Project funding covers our Policy Manager (Green Belts Alliance and Protected Landscapes) for part of their post. This leaves a gap of around £40,000 a year that we need to fill, as well as ongoing funding to support our Policy Manager (Green Belts Alliance and Protected Landscapes) post.

Other funding ambitions

We are, however, always thinking about how we can grow and proposals for projects will be posted below when we are seeking additional funding.

Making Change

Our approach to change-making is grounded in the belief that communities must be empowered to shape the future of the places where they live. Many of Scotland’s least affluent communities are located on the urban fringe —precisely where damaging development pressures are greatest and access to nature is most at risk. These communities often feel dis-empowered and unheard in decision-making processes that affect their quality of life.

We work to change this. Firstly by advising on how to engage with the planning system as it stands, offering bespoke advice and online information and guidance. And secondly by gathering first-hand experience of how the planning system works to campaign for change which, in turn, helps communities’ voices to be heard so they can protect their own local green spaces and biodiversity.

This is our approach in one of the main areas of our work – the planning system – but we have an ambition to extend this approach to all areas of our campaigning and advocacy.https://aprs.scot/aprs-approach-to-making-change-in-the-planning-system/

Our Key Work Areas

As a tiny organisation we have had to prioritise our work to the areas where we can make the most impact. Over the past ten years our key focus areas has been on Green Belts and the Planning System, Deposit Return and the circular economy and National Parks. You can read more about these in the links below. Two of our campaigns have been the subject of well-funded campaigns to bring them down on the point of implementation and I have written about the tactics used.

You can read our Manifesto asks for the 2026 Scottish General Election which shows our wider work and also the policy work we have done.

Making impact

Over the course of a year in 2024/25 a volunteer specialist evaluated our work supporting grassroots and community groups and individuals to engage with the planning system. This work took place through a combination of online guidance, webinars and training, an in-person event with networking and bespoke advice on campaigners specific projects.  Our aims in this work had been:  Firstly equipping people with greater understanding and knowledge of the planning system. And secondly to give people greater confidence to intervene in land-use decision making locally. A third, longer term aim was to influence legislation and policy around land-use and development planning that supports good decision making, including listening to community voice.

The evaluation found that, with an additional day of staff time (doubling our resource to two days a week), we responded to around 60 planning enquiries across 18 local authorities, half related to Green Belts. Our online guidance was accessed over 700 times. Key community concerns included greenspace loss (20%), well being (18%), and environmental impacts (18%). Our webinars and events reached 168 people live, with over 200 hours of online views. Attendees reported greater understanding of the planning system and a 32% increase in confidence to act. We also achieved a major win from a long term project to change how the planning system worked and, as a result, five local campaigns we had been supporting for as long as nine years, won their cases.

We would like the extend an evaluation approach to more of our work and are spending some time to look at the tactics used to bring down two of our long-running campaigns – the Scottish deposit return scheme and the Galloway National Park, just before they were to be implemented. We want to look at the change in the media landscape including the rise of misinformation and work out how we need to respond in future campaigns.

Our People

The APRS Board has specialists across fields of planning, landscape, conservation and energy, as well as in governance and finance. Our Director has 25 years experience working in Scottish conservation and climate across public and charity sectors and is one of our small but experienced team of three part-time staff. APRS is well-respected in policy making circles and we have a track record of punching above our weight. 

Governance Documents

AGM Minutes, Accounts and Annual Reports from previous years are available in our Resources section.

Dear Funder

We hope this page has been useful to you. We always like to get feedback, so if you are looking for something that isn’t here – please let me know and I will add it in.

All the best

Kat Jones, APRS Director