UK: Wiltshire Community Foundation launches #iwill Grants

Deadline: 11-Nov-22

The Wiltshire Community Foundation is pleased to launch the #iwill Fund with an aims to support social action activities that create opportunities for young people aged 10-20, or up to 25 for disabled people, to develop their potential and their capacity to significantly contribute to their community.

Social action involves activities such as campaigning, fundraising and volunteering and has huge potential to create enjoyable opportunities and skills development for young people, and in turn benefit the local people and places.

Principles of Youth Social Action

Successful applicants will show how their project adheres to some of the six principles of youth social action as articulated below:

Reflective – recognising contributions as well as valuing critical reflection and learning
Challenging – stretching and ambitious as well as enjoyable and enabling
Youth Led – led, owned and shaped by young people’s needs, ideas and decision making
Socially impactful – have a clear and intended benefit to a community, cause or social problem
Progressive – sustained, and providing links to other activities and opportunities
Embedded – accessible to all, and well-integrated to existing pathways to become a habit for life

Priorities

They will prioritise projects that:
- Seek to increase participation from young people from less affluent social economic groups and young people who might not usually take part in volunteering, campaigning and fundraising activities, in particular:
  - Young people from socio-economically deprived areas and communities, specifically those scoring lower than 20% on the indices of multiple deprivations.
  - Young people in areas of economic deprivation and those ethnic groups that have been hit especially hard by the Covid-19 pandemic
- Are working with young people at the younger end of the spectrum (10-14 years old)
- Build the appetite of young people to continue with campaigning, fundraising and/or volunteering; support habit forming behaviour; leave a legacy of behaviour/activity after the funding stops
- Involve young people in consultation, planning, delivery and evaluation
- Give young people the opportunity to learn new skills and develop their character and confidence
- Give young people the platform to get their voice heard
The #iwill Fund is made possible thanks to £54 million joint investment (£27 million seed funding each) from The National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to support young people to access high quality social action opportunities.

Funding Information

Grants of up to £10,000 will be awarded to groups for projects lasting up to a year; with the aim of funding both groups that are well established but also those that are new and innovative, especially those that can reach young people that are new to social action.
Please note requests for over £5,000 will need to demonstrate significant reach and impact e.g. high beneficiary numbers, multiple locations, young people with complex needs, strong outcomes or next steps.

Eligibility Criteria

You can apply for a grant if you are a:
- Constituted voluntary or community organization
- Registered charity
- Not-for-profit Company including community interest companies, limited by guarantee, where the majority of directors receive no payment from the company
You need to be a:
- Local or regional organisation only working in Wiltshire or Swindon or in the south/south west of England
- Local branch of a national organisation with a local management committee based in Wiltshire or Swindon with your own constitution and bank account
Your organisation must have:
- An active voluntary management committee with at least three people who are not:
  - Related to each other or in a long-term relationship
  - Living at the same address
Your organisation needs the following financial arrangements and documents:
- A bank account with two signatories that are not related to each other
- Less than 12 months running costs in unrestricted reserves. This means in your end of year financial accounts, Unrestricted reserves (not including Designated funds) must be less than your Expenditure
- Financial records or accounts
- A recent bank statement
- A constitution
- A financial plan or budget showing this year's expected income, expenditure and reserves.
- A Safeguarding Policy and an Equal Opportunities Policy.
If you don't have any of the documents, please talk to them and we will help.
New organisations who do not have the above in place may be able to apply through another charitable organisation.