Volunteering and Employment for Older People Fund
The St Monica Trust is pleased to launch the Volunteering and Employment for Older People Fund for projects that support older people to live their best lives.
Volunteering and Employment for Older People Fund
As part of the St Monica Trust 10-year strategy, we continue to focus on our three guiding principles of enabling connection, contribution and choice for older people. The aim of this fund is to foster positive perceptions of ageing where people live fulfilling, productive lives as they grow older. It seeks to prioritise initiatives that:
• Challenge negative stereotypes about ageing, encouraging respect for older individuals and celebrating their contributions.
• Promote active involvement of older adults in both paid and unpaid work, ensuring they can continue using their skills and experiences.
• Facilitate community integration, where older adults feel valued, engaged and not marginalized or made to feel obsolete.
• Encourage healthy, meaningful ageing, supporting the notion that ageing is a time of continued growth and contribution, rather than decline.
Please note continuation funding will not be available so projects will need to have considered how opportunities for older peoples’ contributions can be sustained at the end of the funding.
What do we want to fund?
Successful projects could include:
• Helping older people return to work or gain work through targeted employment support.• Working with employers to support their existing 55+ aged workforce to plan for later life, to recognise the value of older workers and/or be committed to improving working conditions for the older workforce to enable them to flourish.
• Addressing barriers that prevent older people accessing volunteering or employment opportunities and making organisations and employers aware of these barriers and change their practices to become more age-friendly.
When considering applications, we will prioritise those which evidence how they will:
• Demonstrate how they would enable older people to continue working/volunteer for as long as they want or need.
• Support older people to return to work/gain a volunteer position.
• Enable flexible, age-friendly workplaces/organisations.
• State how their project has the potential to be shared across the wider area.
• Empower older people, through opportunities for connection, contribution and choice.
• Work in partnership with other services and develop collaborative models.
• Connect with existing provision and avoid duplication.
• Have long-term impact and have considered the future sustainability of the project without reliance on continued external funding.
Who can apply?
The St Monica Trust can only accept applications from organisations that:
• Have been constituted for over 12 months and are able to supply financial records.• Are non-profit making and working for the social good. Organisations must have a charitable purpose/s, have a management committee of at least three unrelated people, a set of rules under which the organisation operates and a bank account in the name of the organisation, with at least two signatories.
• Have a safeguarding vulnerable adults policy.
• Support older people living independently in the community.
The St Monica Trust does not award grants to statutory organisations or for the direct replacement of statutory funding.
Eligibility criteria
To be eligible, projects must:
• Be delivered in Bristol, Bath and North East Somerset, South Gloucestershire or North Somerset.
• Start from January 2025.
• State how their work has the potential to be shared across the region/wider area.
How much funding is available?
• We encourage grant applications for a variety of budgets, ranging from a few thousand pounds to a maximum of £30,000 per year. Please only apply for what you need to run your project.
• We will fund projects for 3 years (with a 5% annual increase on any award).
• Projects must start from 1 January 2025.
What can I apply for?
We will cover core costs as well as delivery costs. Grants are available for direct project costs and capital expenditure, plus a fair and reasonable percentage (approximately 10%) for overhead costs.
What are the monitoring and impact requirements?
This fund will contribute to the following outcomes:
Respect and Inclusion - People from all backgrounds and ethnicities feel respected by those around them and feel able to access and engage with services.
• I feel recognised and appreciated.
• I do not feel my age is a barrier.
Belonging and Community Contributions - People feel part of a community and can contribute to their communities through engagement with events, volunteering, or other community action.
• I feel needed/useful.
Creativity and Learning - People can continue to thrive, learn and be inspired.
• I have opportunities and a sense of purpose.
We want to learn from our grant making to better understand issues that underpin our purpose and share findings to improve services and inform our future approach. We will be looking for measurable interventions that link to local need and each project must demonstrate how volunteering and employment opportunities have improved for older people and enriched their lives.
Participants should be asked to score these indicators on a scale of 1 (totally disagree) to 10 (totally agree) at the beginning of the project and at the end to evidence the impact the funding has made. Further details will be agreed with successful organisations.
How to apply
We appreciate the amount of work that goes into making a funding application, so we are therefore using a two-stage process for this fund. We are asking you to firstly submit an Expression of Interest using the form available on our website or on request via charitableimpact@stmonicatrust.org.uk or 0117 949 4003. Alternatively, you can answer the Expression of Interest questions directly into an email.
Before completing the Expression of Interest, please ensure you have read all of the above guidance.
Closing date for Expressions of Interest: Midday, Friday 1 November 2024
Notification of decision: week commencing 11 November 2024
Download the Expression of Interest form
Request for an Expression of Interest form via telephone
Next steps
Following submission of your Expression of Interest, if we feel that your project is a good fit for our strategy you will move to stage two and we will invite you to submit a full proposal. Stage one (the Expression of Interest) is your opportunity to provide the key information that will most strongly influence our funding decisions.
The deadline for full applications will be Friday 29 November 2024 (invitation only) with decisions communicated and funds awarded in December 2024.