Three New Volunteering Funds from Nesta

Nesta has just launched three new funds aimed at supporting impact volunteering for people aged fifty and older.
One of these funds may be well suited to your organisation, or you may know others in England who could be interested in applying.
There is information below that broadly set out what sorts of organisations would be well suited to each fund, and further details can be found on the respective website links. All applications close towards the end of October, so please take a look and apply!
The three funds are:
The Second Half Fund – to scale the best volunteering opportunities supporting children to thrive, to reduce isolation and tackle local crisis events.
The Join In Stay In Fund – to test what works in retaining volunteers fifty and older
The Give More Get More Fund – to develop ‘gap year’ style high-intensity volunteering opportunities for people fifty and older
The Second Half Fund
The Second Half Fund will award grants of up to £250,000 to support proven innovations that mobilise the time and talents of people in the second half of their lives to help others, alongside public services, to grow.
There are four themes for this fund, where evidence shows volunteering alongside public services is well placed to act:

• Parents and families (people 50+ supporting parents)
• Children and young people (people 50+ supporting learners)
• Older people (people 50+ supporting their peers)
• Resilient places (people 50+ volunteering in emergencies or making places more resilient)

The Second Half Fund will be well suited to charities, social enterprises and others that have a proven model for engaging volunteers and an ambition to scale in order to help many more people. Your project must be up and running already, but you’ll be looking to expand into new geographies or explicitly recruit many more people aged 50+ for the first time.
The Join In Stay In Fund
The Join In Stay In Fund will award grants of up to £50,000 and significant non-financial support from behavioral science experts for organisations to undertake Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) to understand what works best to encourage volunteers to continue to give their time regularly. Awardees will need to run a one-off event to recruit at least 500 new volunteers who are fifty 50+ (so there is a sufficiently large sample size to carry out the RCTs) and then trial offering the volunteers different incentives to give their time again.
The Join In Stay In Fund will be well suited to charities, local authorities and others who already have experience / capacity to run large scale volunteering events and have a pipeline of routine impact volunteering opportunities that retained volunteers aged 50+ can be invited to take part in. Organisations will also need to have reliable systems in place for understanding how many volunteers are active at a given time.
The Give More Get More Fund
The Give More Get More Fund will award grants of up to £100,000 to support organisations to trial intensive volunteering placements for people over 50 – approaching or in retirement – to achieve clear outcomes that work alongside public services.
The Give More Get More Fund will be well suited to large charities, local authorities, hospitals and others organisations that have an existing track record in recruiting and retaining volunteers to achieve clear impact, and the capacity to mobilise the time and talents of at least 100 people to carry out at least 150 hours of high impact volunteering over a short period.

Posted on 30th September 2016