Applications open for £2m youth loneliness fund
Melanie May | 16 August 2018 | News
The Building Connections Fund Youth strand is inviting charities and community organisations from across England to apply for up to £80,000 to expand or enhance work tackling youth loneliness in the most deprived areas of the UK.
Applications are open until 26 September. Organisations can apply for up to £80,000: up to £10,000 (to be spent between December 2018 and March 2019) to engage young people in co-designing innovations to improve the impact of existing provision on tackling loneliness, and up to £70,000 (to be spent between April 2019 and March 2021) to implement and evaluate these innovations.
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The funding is available for projects that support any groups of young people within the most deprived 30% areas of England.
Grants can also support projects from any location in England that mainly benefit young people with any one or more of the following circumstances:
- Being a carer
- Being unemployed or precariously employed
- Experiencing bereavement
- Having a disability or long-term health condition
- Having been in the care system.
More information as well as the application form is available on the Co-op Foundation site.
The £11.5 million Building Connections Fund is a partnership between Government, Big Lottery Fund and the Co-op Foundation, set up in response to the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness to support projects in England that prevent or reduce loneliness.
It is split into two strands: the Main fund and the Youth strand. The £2 million Youth strand is made up of £1m from Government and £1m match funding from the Co-op Foundation.
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.