Postcode Lottery Grants

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The People’s Postcode Lottery has made more than £3m of grant funding available for local charities and community groups.

Charities in England, Scotland and Wales will be able to apply for grants of between £500 and £20,000 when applications open from 1 August for two weeks.

The People’s Postcode Lottery said it would award funding through three trusts, one of which (The People’s Postcode Trust) will focus on projects promoting human rights and employability, and those that combat poverty. Click here for further information.

A second trust (the Postcode Community Trust) will concentrate on grass-roots health and well-being programmes. Click here for further information.

The third trust (The Postcode Local Trust) will support programmes that aim to improve biodiversity and outdoor spaces. Click here for more information.

The Lottery states:

We are very excited to see the applications come in this year from across Great Britain. Across the three trusts, a huge variety of projects can benefit and we urge groups to take a look at the websites, see where their projects fit and get applying.

Free Practitioner Meeting – October 2018

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Support Cambridgeshire is running a free Practitioner meeting on the subject of community cafes on the 18th October 2018 between 12.45pm and 2.30pm at the Maple Centre in Huntingdon.

Lunch is provided and will be served at 12.15pm, before the session begins.

The discussion will be facilitated by Ben Pitt of Love’s Farm House in St Neots, and will be an interactive session where people can discuss their thoughts, ideas and challenges on the subject.

If you have run a community cafe, or are thinking of running one then this session may be of interest.

To book your space contact russell@huntsforum.org.uk

Numbers will be limited to 20.

Details on the Maple Centre can be found here: 

Parking is available off Nene Road. Simply walk across the pedestrian bridge to access the centre.

 

Building Connections Fund launches

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The new Building Connections Fund has been launched for projects that aim to reduce loneliness and social isolation.

The fund is a partnership between Government, The Big Lottery and the Co-op Foundation and aims to:

  • Increase social connections, helping people form strong and meaningful relationships and creating a sense of community and belonging, and helping people feel more connected.
  • Support organisations to build on their existing work (by reaching more people, or working in a new area or with a different method or group of people).
  • Encourage organisations to join up with others locally and work in partnerships.
  • Improve the evidence base and use learning to inform longer term policy and funding decisions.

The fund is valued at 11.5M.

For more details, including how to apply, please visit:

https://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/funding/programmes/building-connections-fund

If you need any data to help support your bid please contact Esther.Baffa-Isaacs@cambridgeshire.gov.uk

 

Applications open to the Fore

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The Fore is supported by the Big Lottery through its Partnership Funding Stream. It opens its next round of applications on the 23rd July 2018.

The Fore offers unrestricted funding and strategic support to small charities and social enterprises across the UK. It aims to make grants that will have a transformational impact by enabling them to grow, become more sustainable, more efficient, or take some other major step forward toward achieving their goals.

The Fore is being supported until July 2019 by £1.3 million of National Lottery funding thanks to a partnership with the Big Lottery Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK.

The Fore runs three 12-week funding rounds each year and makes grants of up to £30,000 over one to three years. Funding can be used to cover core costs.

The Fore are proud to be a funder without lengthy application forms or restrictive criteria. They recognise applicants as the experts in their own fields, so its process simply asks you to tell them who you are, what you need and how funding from us would transform your organisation.

They also provide successful applicants with access to friendly professional support, which includes ongoing mentoring, strategic advice, governance support or other assistance.

They fund work in all areas and have only two requirements for application:

  • The organisation must be a UK-registered Charity, CIC, CIO or CBS.
  • The organisation must have an annual income of less than £500,000.

Registration for The Fore’s next round opens on July 23 2018 at 10am, and only takes a few minutes to complete.

Please note that registration is highly competitive and operates on a first come, first served basis, so they encourage interested organisations to register as quickly as possible. Once successfully registered, applicants are given one month to prepare a three page application and gather their recent audited accounts, ready for submission.

The Orchards East Project – volunteers required

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Orchards East is an exciting environmental and cultural project covering six counties in the east of England (Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk).
Funded by the Heritage Lottery fund and based in the School of History at the University of East Anglia (UEA), it is devoted to discovering and understanding the past, present and future of orchards in eastern England, and will last for three years.

Working with hundreds of new volunteers, the project will survey and record old orchard sites across the East of England, as well as research the social, cultural and economic history of fruit growing in the region. Results of these investigations will be widely shared through education and publication.

The project also aims to restore important old orchards, and to create new examples, for the enjoyment of local communities.

How can you get involved?

There are lots of ways you can get involved: telling us about an orchard near you, volunteering in the survey, participating in an orchard restoration workshop, helping to set up a new
community orchard in your neighbourhood, or recording stories of local orchards through the oral history project.

You can find out more about getting involved by visiting their website, www.orchardseast.org.uk where you will find information on volunteering as well as lists of events,
such as local Apple Days and information on partner organisations.

You can also sign up online to receive their regular bulletins and quarterly newsletter.

 

 

 

 

Whose seen the latest Facebook advert?

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Many of you may have seen the latest television advert from Facebook. It was less about people and connections, and more about how they will ensure your data protection and security, thus enabling users to come to Facebook for all the right reasons. Given that the reach of social media is increasing all the time, and given the recent issues Facebook have had on the subject, the advert is very timely.

You may take the view that social media is about relationships, engagement and interactivity and not really about data privacy, online security and participant consent but as Andrew Beverley from Our Social Times reports its time to think again..!!

The General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR is now in place, and has been since the 25th May 2018. It covers the use of all personal data, whether that’s computerised or not.

Article 35 of the regulation requires that these processes are scrutinised such that data subjects have clarity about the effective protection of their personal information.

He continues:

GDPR requires that one of six categories of the legal basis for the processing of personal data are in place. Of particular note are two of these:

Consent of the data subject: By this we mean customer, potential customer, service user, beneficiary or anyone else not part of the data processing organisation.

Necessary for the performance of a contract with the data subject: By this we mean an auditable agreement between the organisation and the data subject which explains the acceptable use of their personal data.

So where’s the link between GDPR and Social media?

Andrew Beverley explains:

As Marketers you are concerned with making the most effective use of social media tools or platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Snapchat or Instagram.

The last thing you are likely to worry about is having your followers, friends or connections actually providing you with consent to store or use their data.

You will be pleased to hear that as far as consent and data use is concerned, these will be effectively covered by the terms and conditions and privacy notices of each of these software tools.

In short, this means that both you and your social media audience agree to the terms of the tools you use.

So while you can breathe easier it’s worth being mindful of the bigger picture he notes:

The tick box before the app opens:

While you might not be a big fan of small print, social media users will need to be presented with a clear Privacy Notice or similar, which is available for their consideration before they decide to sign up and start participating. The Terms and conditions of joining will almost certainly contain one of the two legal bases for processing above (explicit consent or the performance of a contract).

That of course does not exempt you from exercising proper care with your use of personal data from your social media followers. For example, it will not be acceptable to take a customer’s email address and then look to use that in any undeclared email marketing or data processing activities.

Some other social media pointers:

A social media ‘name’ is a personal identifier. This is significant: If an application voluntarily decides to make that public, then that is their decision with full understanding and expectation that it will be seen by others. On another note, it will be interesting to see how the social media platforms will be expected to deal with subsequent data subject erasure requests, especially when many social media interactions record the participation of two or more individuals in exchanges of communications. Will simple deletion be sufficient? Who knows – watch this space?

How to handle a social media crisis?

If  a social media crisis does hit, there’s always a right way or a wrong way of handling the situation: Click here for some examples (of the good, the bad and the ugly) all courtesy of Our Social Times.

Calling all CEOs

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The yet-to-be-published State of the Sector Survey for 2018 (readers can expect this in the next 2 weeks) shows categorically that organisations across Cambridgeshire require a Chief Officer Network in order to discuss some of the big issues facing the sector at present.

It has fallen to Support Cambridgeshire to facilitate these, and we hope to hold the first in September 2018 (probably the last 2 weeks of that month but yet to be confirmed).

If any CEOs are interested in attending this first Network session then please contact russell@huntsforum.org.uk.

We will find a suitable venue for this first session, dependent upon response levels, and it is envisaged that frequency, ground rules and subjects for debate will be discussed at the first gathering.

 

Strengthening The Social Value Act?

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The Government will strengthen the Social Value Act to require commissioners to “explicitly evaluate” social value on major procurements when they tender a contract, a cabinet minister said on the 25th June 2018.

David Lidington, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, gave a speech at the Reform think tank in which he committed to using more voluntary sector organisations to deliver public services.

He announced plans to amend the Social Value Act, which currently requires commissioners to consider the wider value added to society by each bidder, so that all major procurements will now have to “explicitly evaluate” those benefits.

The move is an attempt to rebuild trust following the collapse of Carillion, the construction giant which was a major supplier of services to the Government.

“We want to see public services delivered with values at their heart, where the wider social benefits matter and are recognised,” Lidington said. “That means government doing more to create and nurture vibrant, healthy, innovative, competitive and diverse marketplaces of suppliers that include and encourage small businesses, mutuals, charities, co-operatives and social enterprises – and therefore harness the finest talent from across the public, private and voluntary sectors.”

The measures are being cast an attempt to level the playing field for charities, social enterprises and other civil society organisations.

Source: Civil Society News

Support Cambridgeshire comment:

Whilst any changes that strengthen the Social Value Act should be commended, the majority of Charities will remain unaffected, simply because they are likely to be competing or bidding for contracts much smaller than those deemed as major procurements (where the changes apply). Charities across all service areas have consistently complained at the way Government funding is distributed, particularly the aggregation of contracts into larger and larger lots which mitigate against small and local organisations which are rooted in their local communities. For more information about how valuable smaller organisations can be read the latest report on the Value of Small by clicking here:  

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