Our community backs students facing hardship

More than 150 students have successfully applied for funding from our Hardship Fund as we look to support students to cope with the impact of COVID-19.

Our efforts to help our most vulnerable students during this global crisis is now being supported by over 200 donors who have pledged more than £100,000 in just two weeks.

Alumni, friends of the University and Essex colleagues have all contributed to this incredible total since we launched our appeal.

• Donate to the Hardship Fund

Helping students cope with unexpected challenges

The Hardship Fund exists to support students with unexpected, short-term financial difficulty to help them to continue with their studies at Essex.

We know that many of our students are experiencing financial difficulty as a result of COVID-19 and we’re trying to make sure we can support them.

Supporting more students

We know COVID-19 is impacting our students around the world so we’ve expanded the scope of the Hardship Fund. All students now have access to apply to the Fund; whether full time or part time, UK, EU or International or undergraduate or postgraduate.

Over the last five weeks, the Hardship Fund has seen a substantial increase in applications, well above the total number received during the whole of 2019. But, we’ve also been able to help over 150 students with grants from the Fund.

We want to help more

We can all see the need to make more funding available to support our students in need at this time. If you’ve not yet donated and are in a position to do so, please consider supporting the Hardship Fund.

Director of Advancement Jo Rogers said: “We’re so thankful to the alumni, colleagues and friends of the University who have made a pledge to the Hardship Fund, helping us to reach the incredible milestone of £100,000 in just two weeks.

The Hardship Fund is now accessible to all students and thanks to the generosity of our amazing community we can now help even more students who are in need at this time.”