Stronger Communities Fund Review

Our Stronger Communities Fund is a pot of money we set aside to support projects within our communities which benefit our customers. Organisations can apply for grants or in-kind help from our workmen to help achieve their project outcomes. You can read about some of the success stories from previous applicants here: Supporting your communities – Selwood Housing

Policy review

What did we ask?

We invited five of our customers to help us review our Stronger Communities Fund. Our customers were asked to research our offer and then join us in a focus group to discuss what they found and how we might improve things.

We also consulted them on our proposal to add a new level of funding which would allow individual customers to apply for up to £500 to improve their communities.

What did our customers say?

Our customers gave us a lot to think about. Below we have summarised the recommendations into two points

• There are three distinct levels of funding available; in-kind support, community organisation grants and the new individual grants. But this isn’t made clear through our current offer. We need to define each level, the timescales and decision-making process, who is the target audience is for each and provide examples of what a successful application would look like. We also need to make the fund easier to find on our website.
• We need to think Carefully about how we will manage the new individual grants. As we’re going to be offering money to people who have likely never ran a project before, we need to re-think how we pay out to successful applications and how we support applicants to achieve their projects.

What are our next steps?

In the short term we will be looking at making the necessary changes to our policy, procedure, application process and website in line with our customer’s recommendations. Our long-term goal is to work on our offer of individual grants to customers. We are planning to trial a few applications over a six month period and then review this part of the offer again to see what works and what doesn’t.

If you want to find out more about the Stronger Communities Fund or talk to one of our facilitators about an application, email us at makeadifference@selwoodhousing.com.