Capacity Building

The Dowager Countess Eleanor Peel Trust are offering grants of over £5,000 to registered charities with the emphasis on helping: medical charities and research; older people; and those who have fallen on hard times through no fault of their own.

Preference is given to smaller to medium sized charities where grants will make a difference. Applications for general grants from large well-funded charities (income in excess of £2.5million per annum) will be rejected.

The Trustees aim to support fewer charities with larger average grants.

The Golden Bottle Trust and the Bulldog Trust are seeking to make small to medium sized grants (£1,000 - £30,000 over a maximum of 3 years) to new and existing organisations to enable them to get closer to achieving their goals.

For many organisations looking to finance new projects, seeking funding can be extremely difficult and in some cases, impossible. Common problems include time consuming application processes, minimum grant levels being too high, the project not fitting into a specific funding category or the organisation not meeting the strict criteria often required.

The Shackleton Foundation invest in inspirational leaders and early-stage social enterprises with the potential to make a real difference to the lives of disadvantaged young people.

The Foundation provides up to £10,000 of seed funding and support to enable aspiring leaders and social entrepreneurs to establish their own ventures to help young people in challenging circumstances.

At the end of last year, online training provider Inspire, Motivate & Engage (IME) conducted research with to explore the challenges facing them in 2014. This research highlighted that 92% of charities believe that creating career development opportunities is crucial to engage staff in 2014. However 85% explained that reduced budgets for training would make this difficult, negatively impacting staff recognition efforts, skills development and general professional performance.

This new scheme offers financial support to individuals and organisations, to create and run pilot projects which take science to diverse audiences, and engage them with science in their own communities.

Aims
The scheme aims to:
• reach audiences of all ages and from all walks of life that are currently under-served by existing activities and inform, inspire and involve them in science
• investigate and test new methods of engagement and participation.

How can the Big Lottery Fund best help communities and people most in need?

From March until July 2014, the Big Lottery Fund are inviting people to add their voice to a UK wide conversation around key areas of Big Lottery Fund’s work.

Your views will help them to consider their role as a funder and help shape their vision and plans from 2015 to 2021. Most importantly it will help them to deliver the following four themes:

Small Charities Coalition has relaunched their free Trustee Finder service, which helps charities recruit new trustees.

Improvements have been made to significantly increase the number of potential trustees viewing the vacancies and, as a result, help fill more trustee positions in charities of all sizes.

To view Trustee Finder, visit: www.smallcharities.org.uk/trustee-finder/
 

Inspired Facilities is a Sport England £110 million programme that funds the renovation and modernisation of local sports facilities.

Inspired Facilities can fund formally constituted not-for-profit organisations and statutory bodies. This might include sports clubs, voluntary organisations, local authorities, schools or governing bodies of sport.

New research from ACEVO, the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, has warned that communities face a crisis point in the ability of local services to keep pace with rising levels of need in society.

The findings emerge in the first survey from ACEVO’s 2014 Social Sector Tracker, the charity sector’s annual flagship surveys of senior social leaders and charity chief executives.