A Suffolk Community Covid Restart Grant is available for between £250 and £2,500 specifically aimed at supporting groups, clubs and organisations in the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector to reopen and restart their services.
Voluntary and Community organisations, plus Community sports clubs, organisations, groups and volunteer led participatory sporting events are encouraged to apply for funding via the Suffolk Community Restart Fund.
As of 1st May 2022 limited funds are still available for the following districts, but applications may close at short notice once they have been allocated:
- Ipswich – Community groups and sports funding available
- East Suffolk – Community groups and Sports groups
If you are a VCSE organisation in Suffolk looking for funding support please visit our Funding and Sustainability webpage here, to find out about our free 1-1 funding surgeries and the Funding4Suffolk portal, where you can search for grants suited to your project.
Funding Areas awarded through Restart Grants
What can be funded
Over 300 grants have already been awarded, including funding for activities such as:
- Volunteer and staff training, returning training levels to pre-covid capacity e.g., in areas such as health and safety requirements, risk assessments, lapsed first aid training etc. This includes technical sports qualifications and coaching courses such as pool lifeguard qualifications
- Holding an event to reengage communities (such as sports open day), including venue hire, refreshments and decorations.
- Increasing confidence and participation by subsidising places. For example, bowls taster sessions.
- Where there is an increase in costs due to Covid impact, the difference may be funded. For example, running two netball training sessions instead of one to enable social distancing.
- Improvements to ICT infrastructure to enable groups to continue to meet and/or to deliver new sessions virtually.
- Signage, PPE, and screens for community buildings.
- New telephony systems e.g., to support service delivery or management of volunteers.
- Promotional material / marketing (printed or virtual) explaining how a service is changing.
- Equipment to enable a new service to be offered safely.
- Additional staffing (not core staffing costs that are already funded)
- Other Coronavirus-related adaptations, repairs and modifications, e.g., contactless payment systems, or restorative work where a strong link to covid interruption can be demonstrated
- Cleaning/hygiene – keeping facilities and equipment clean
- Additional sports equipment/kit to minimise sharing e.g reversible sports bibs to avoid sharing within sports teams.