Ghar Parau Foundation Expedition Grant Award

The Ghar Parau Foundation Expedition Grant Award supports British caving expeditions worldwide, emphasizing innovative exploration and scientific study. With a focus on encouraging young cavers, the fund aims to sustain an active caving community. Limited resources necessitate a careful evaluation of expedition merits based on criteria such as potential discoveries, team experience, and effective fund usage. The foundation is committed to promoting safe and inclusive exploration, ensuring the future of caving through financial assistance and community engagement.

The Ghar Parau Foundation (GPF) provides funding to assist British caving expeditions to all parts of the world. The fund focuses on those expeditions that include an element of innovative exploration or scientific study and has a close relationship with the British Cave Research Association (BCRA).
GPF is particularly keen to encourage young cavers into expedition caving (as well as sport caving) to maintain an active caving community in years to come.
A Cave Link system partly funded by Ghar Parau is also available for use by GPF-funded expeditions.
It is a regrettable fact that the committee only has limited resources at its disposal. In order to make the best and fairest use of funds, GPF has over the years developed a set of criteria that allow the committee to judge the merits of one expedition against another. Further details of these may be found in the application form and notes; in brief, they may be summarised as:
potential for the discovery of new cavethe development of the sport as a wholebenefits to the individual team memberspreparatory work and researchcontacts with local groupsteam sizeeffective use of fundstrack recordother sources of incomeyoung member participationquality of application

Eligibility

An Exploration Expedition is classified as a trip involving 2 or more people for a period of 5 or more (in-field) days to a caving area to undertake exploration caving and science outside the UK.The expedition can be multi-national, but generally, only Qualifying Participants will be considered for GPF Grant aid. There is a proviso that up to 25% of non-qualifying people may also be considered if these are indigenous cavers from countries where their caving community is small and would benefit from participation in an international expedition. These indigenous cavers must be true expedition participants, i.e. not guides, porters etc.A Qualifying Participant must be any of the following:a UK national;a non-UK national in full-time education in the UK;a member of a UK-based caving club or BCA who is resident in the UK.The applicant (i.e. the leader of the expedition) has to be a Qualifying Participant. (N.B. In the case of a multi-national expedition involving Qualifying Participants where the leader is non-qualifying, a Qualifying Participant can be designated as the leader of the UK contingent and thus apply for Grant aid).The application process does not permit joint expedition leaders, (a single individual must be designated the leader of the expedition).