Berkeley Foundation: Resilience Fund in the UK

Deadline: 31-Oct-22

The Berkeley Foundation is now inviting applications for its Resilience Fund to support organisations working to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people from Black and Minoritised communities.

The focus of funding will be on building organisational resilience and they are unable to consider applications for programme delivery.

Priorities

They will prioritise funding for organisations that:
- are led by people from Black and Minoritised communities;
- are working with young people at key transition points in their lives (for example, leaving care or the justice system, or transitioning between school and college).

Goals: Through the Resilience Fund, they hope to give partner organisations the space, time and funding to build their resilience, so that they will be around to support young people and their communities for many years to come.

What do they mean by ‘resilience’?

They believe that building resilience provides an opportunity for organisations to invest in long-term sustainability, over short-term effectiveness.
The overall goal is that participating organisations will have an ‘improved ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper’ (Cranfield University, 2017).
There is no one single success formula for organisational resilience; however, considerable work has been done across the sector to identify the key building blocks. These include, but are not limited to, the five objectives overleaf. They will consider funding projects working towards one or more of these building blocks.

Funding Information

The Resilience Fund forms part of the new Strategy and represents a £900,000 investment in strengthening the voluntary sector over four years. It aims to support small to medium sized organisations to invest in organisational development and build resilience for the future.

What they can’t fund?

Local Authorities and other statutory agencies;
Schools;
Organisations with an annual income of under £100,000, or over £1.5m;
New organisations without at least one year of published accounts;
Organisations that do not work in the specified geographical areas;
Individuals;
Capital projects;
Work that has already begun;
Organisations that do not have an up to date safeguarding policy;
Organisations who have already benefitted from the Capacity Building Fund.

Eligibility Criteria

In order to apply to the Resilience Fund, your organisation must:
- be a registered charity or CIC with an annual income between £100,000 – £1.5m;
- have at least one year of published accounts;
- cover and deliver in at least one of the following geographical areas – Greater London, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey, Kent, Hampshire, West Sussex, Warwickshire and the City of Birmingham;
- deliver services targeted at young people from Black and Minoritised communities (by targeted they mean more than 50% of your organisation’s beneficiaries);
- deliver services that improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people from Black and Minoritised communities;
- apply for funding towards organisational development work and not frontline delivery;
- apply for funding over two years;
- request no more than 20% of your overall turnover in any one year;
- have a safeguarding policy in place before the start of the proposed project;
- not have had support from Berkeley Foundation’s Capacity Building Fund in the past.