Deadline: 13-Aug-21
The Santander Foundation is seeking applications for its grant program to launch their new strategy for 2021 to 2024, helping people to become digitally and financially empowered.
They have developed the Financial & Digital Empowerment Fund to help more people in the UK become digitally and financially empowered.
They want to support UK charities to give people the digital confidence, knowledge, and skills to enable then to make better, more informed decisions about money and have access to financial services. Together they can make a positive impact in their communities.
If you’re part of a charitable organisation that shares their ambition, then you’re in the right place. Together, lets make a difference.
What can they achieve together?
- They want to empower people to make better decisions about money.
- They want to equip people with better digital and financial literacy skills to achieve new opportunities for employment and education.
- They want people to feel safe when using digital tools.
Funding Information
- They want to provide grants to organisations in the UK, and support you in delivering digital and financial empowerment to people over the next three years.
- They are investing £1.8 million into their Financial & Digital Empowerment Fund in 2021.
- They aim to award 12 grants of up to a total of £150,000 per organisation. They will award grants over a three-year period.
- If accepted, you can ask for differing amounts in each of the three years. You can request a minimum of £25,000 in any one year, with the maximum of £150,000 over three years.
- They have some important requirements that you must be able to meet to apply for a Santander Foundation Grant.
Why are they doing it?
- They all have a responsibility to ensure they have a positive impact on their communities and through their new strategy they believe they can do more.
- They know that without access to appropriate mainstream financial services and tools, people pay more for goods and services and have less choice. The impacts of exclusion are not just financial but also affect education, employment, health, housing and overall wellbeing.
- The pandemic has highlighted just how important digital and financial skills are. Millions of people have been forced to use the internet to carry out basic transactions, and for many this has proven a huge challenge. With an increasing range of services likely to move online in the future, a lack of digital skills will further reduce the choices available to people.
Who do they want to support?
- There are millions of people in their society that are already at a disadvantage – through age, education, income, disability, or unemployment. Without the right support for them, the social inequality gap will only widen.
- Many charitable and community interest organisations work with such groups; with people that feel the impacts of financial or digital exclusion the most.
- They want to reach lone parents, single pensioners, migrants and refugees, those with long term illnesses and disabilities, those struggling to find sustained employment and households headed by students or part-time workers. These are among the groups most commonly excluded from financial services.
- People with low or unstable incomes, or those who have experienced a significant life shock, are particularly affected by financial exclusion. The pandemic will only have made this situation worse, as more and more basic services have moved to the web. They want to help charities build their capacity to help people to become digitally and financially empowered.
Eligibility Criteria
If your organisation chooses to apply you must:
- be based in the UK and working within one of the nations or regions.
- be a UK registered charity or Community Interest Company.
- have at least three unconnected Trustees, Directors or Management Committee members. By unconnected they mean not related by blood, marriage, in a long-term relationship or living together at the same address.
- have an annual income above £75,000. They aim to fund no more than 40% of an organisation’s income in any one year. They anticipate most of the organisations They will support will be small and medium-sized organisations with an income of less than £2 million.
- have a bank account in the organisation’s name with at least two unconnected signatories.
- have been operating for at least 18 months and have at least one set of annual accounts.
For more information, visit https://www.santandersustainability.co.uk/the-santander-foundation