This is where we’ll post third sector news and important updates that are useful for your organisation.
Mind in West Essex have new free courses on their online academy. These new courses include Intro to Mental Health and Intro to Stress. There are many more free and paid for courses on the academy website for you to experience.
If you have an online course you would like hosted on the academy you can contact the online training team here.
This exciting new two year project is intended to support individuals and families impacted by the COVID-10 pandemic across West Essex, through loss of income, illness, need to self-isolate and who have limited or no access to digital devices/data in order to be able to access services such as employment support, skills for life, online shopping, banking, socialising and health interventions and appointments.
The project intends to address four key elements of digital exclusion:
The project will be working in close partnership with key statutory and VCS agencies across West Essex who support marginalised and vulnerable groups, to ensure there is widespread knowledge of its existence and easy referral routes in.
The project will also be playing a particular emphasis on providing tailored support to access digital for people experiencing poor mental health and those from minority ethnic communities.
We have commissioned the development of a purpose built digital platform that will enable people to donate and receive donations of equipment and data and that will enable us to provide training and skills development resources, as well as a volunteer management and coordination system.
For further information on this exciting new project please contact Ali Firth – Digital Inclusion Project Lead on 07578 665659 or by emailing [email protected]
Provide is an Essex based social enterprise owned by its staff members and delivers a broad range of community health services in the County and beyond. The Provide Foundation is managed by Essex Community Foundation (ECF), with the aim to improve and increase access to community health projects and services by supporting voluntary and community organisations working in Essex, Southend, and Thurrock.
This year, the Provide Foundation would like to support organisations or projects that have a clear link to health and social care, and meet one of the following:
Links to health and social care ought to include one of the following:
Grants of up to £20,000 for one year are available
The Panel is interested in:
Please complete your application here and submit your supporting documents by Friday 4 February. The Provide Foundation will award grants in early April.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss your organisation’s funding needs, then please contact us. You can reach us on 01245 356018 or [email protected]. You can also set up a time to speak with a member of the grants team here using the General Catch Up option.
Supporting the arts, culture and creative industries in Essex.
Now open for applications. The Essex County Council Arts and Cultural fund has been designed to help organisations and practitioners to deliver a broad and exciting range of work and activity to engage with and bring communities together.
The arts, cultural and creative projects, such as festivals and exhibitions, all contribute to helping communities recover from the pandemic and play an integral part in enabling the objectives of Essex County Council’s wider objectives as set out in Everyone’s Essex.
Creative and cultural sectors are at the forefront of economic and social regeneration in our region. One of the aims of the fund is to provide a boost for the creative and cultural sector which will enable organisations and practioners to develop long term and sustainable future for arts and culture in the county.
Now open for applications, the ECC Arts and Cultural Fund will offer artists and cultural organisations grants from £2,500 to £30,000 to deliver projects to help support and rejuvenate the Essex arts and culture sector, as well as the county’s towns and city high streets.
The fund will support projects, which will contribute to ECC’s Everyone’s Essex: The Plan for Essex 2021-2025 within the music, theatre, dance, visual arts, literature, combined arts, including festivals and carnivals, museums and the wider creative sectors.
The Arts and Cultural Fund will support revenue programmes only, not capital. A full list of what the Fund cannot support can be found in the guidance.
Examples of eligible organisations include:
• Individual artists or artistic cooperatives
• Community groups
• Charities or trusts
• Community interest companies
• Social enterprises
• Public sector organisations (not local authorities)
• Private sector organisations
• Organisations that are part of a local authority’s direct provision will be considered on a case-by-case basis
Read the full guidance document here.
Read the Fund FAQs here.
Apply now here.
Whether snippets or full-length features, videos are fast becoming the most consumed content online. But, through presumed lack of resource and time, charities are missing out.
Videos don’t have to be difficult. In fact, producing a quality video can be very easy. Make sure you don’t let the lack of video expertise stop your digital teams from creativity.
Here, we showcase how to successfully create and produce different types of video content for charity audiences.
Planning daily, weekly, or monthly content is exhausting. Luckily, there are lots of great ideas out there. As a guide, video content should be short, instantly relevant, and aim to draw in and engage audiences.
Reason Digital outlines best practices for video production. They are:
Aside from best practices, there are so many videos that charities can learn from. Most, if not all, contain elements of Reason Digital’s advice.
Showing snippets of the charity’s work and purpose will engage and motivate supporters. Both large and small charities are producing videos that create an intimate feeling to build a connection with their audience.
Campaigns by Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity (GOSH) contain exemplary videos. In an earlier fundraising effort, they used 360-degree videos to showcase where funds go. Audiences get a behind-the-scenes look at how donations have funded cutting edge facilities.
Last year’s Christmas campaign was also full of emotion and delight. The animated clip showed children being whisked home while asleep. In a surprise ending, the animated clip turned into real footage, bringing audiences closer to the work that GOSH does.
Evidently, for GOSH, video is an excellent way to tell audiences about the work they do and share a compelling story.
Social media marketing sounds like it should be easy. But it rarely ends up being that way. For charities, it can often feel like it isn’t worth investing your time and money, but with more than half the world’s population using social media daily, it’s almost impossible to ignore.
In our upcoming webinar, we aim to make things easier. Nick Wyatt, Charity Digital Growth Marketing Executive, aims to help your charity start their social media marketing journey, examining how social media can improve fundraising, service delivery, and so much more.
The webinar will cover, among many other things, the different platforms you should be using, the various advantages and disadvantages of each platform, how to pick the platform that best meets your audience’s needs, and how to make the right content or the right platform.
Essex Community Foundation, along with the community foundations network across the UK, will be distributing the ‘Arts Council England Let’s Create Jubilee Fund’.
This is a £5 million programme that will support community and voluntary organisations in England to develop creative and cultural activities as part of Her Majesty The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June 2022.
The programme is made possible with funding from the National Lottery, whose players raise £30 million for good causes every week. The Fund’s distribution will be managed by UK Community Foundations on behalf of their community foundation members across England.
Applicants will be able to apply for grants of up to £10,000, and are encouraged to partner with established artists, creatives and cultural organisations to develop their activities, ensuring that The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations give people throughout England the chance to experience the best of the country’s culture while also celebrating an important milestone in our national history. You can find a list of established artists here on the Arts Council website.
Darren Henley, Chief Executive at Arts Council England said “We’re giving people across the country the chance to come together to experience the joy of culture and creativity in celebration of this historic milestone. With the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee taking place alongside the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games Festival and the Unboxed festival of UK creativity, next year is set to be a magnificent celebration of our nation’s artistic achievements.”
Rosemary Macdonald, CEO at UK Community Foundations said “UK Community Foundations is proud to partner with Arts Council England to deliver the Let’s Create Jubilee Fund. Our members look forward to working with local groups and artists who will create imaginative and innovative celebrations to mark this historic occasion, and strengthen cultural involvement and opportunities in their communities.”
The application guidelines for the Let’s Create Jubilee Fund can be found on the UK Community Foundations website here. Large print and easy read options available on there too.
Complete the online application form here. The deadline to submit your application is 28 February.
If you have any questions or would like to speak to a grants officer at ECF in advance of applying, please call us on 01245 356018 or book a time slot here.
Please see the attached job description here
To apply for this position please contact [email protected] by the closing date of Friday 25th February 2022.
Interview date TBC via zoom
Age Well East (formerly Age Concern Colchester & North-East Essex – current rebrand running) has gone through exponential growth. Since 2017 the focus has increased from Colchester to North-East Essex and now across Essex and Suffolk. This growth is driven by unmet needs and this growth requires strengthening with a Head of Operations within the senior leadership team to maintain the current operation and manage future growth. The Head of Support Services, Head of Operations and CEO form the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and complement the established base of Operations Managers, Team Leaders and the frontline staff that underpin excellent operational delivery.
The Head of Operations will grow an established operations unit to develop first-class frontline services that change lives. A key element of this role is maintaining existing operations, embedding recent contract wins for April 2022 and then developing services based on new major contract wins.
The organisation, due to high growth, will have direct reports, team leaders and operations managers reporting in. Over time, and as the department and income settle, this will restructure to a more traditional structure of operations managers reporting lines. Therefore the right individual will be comfortable managing at different levels until the full structure is in place.
If you are a passionate leader looking to take a high growth operation to new heights we welcome your CV and covering letter and to meet in person. We are building something special at Age Well East and we are looking for a high calibre Head of Operations to lead the frontline team.
We aim to be an equal opportunities employer and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or race, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.
Mission
Age Well East supports and empowers individuals to become happier and healthier.
Values
Apply today and we look forward to discussing what we can achieve together.
In this episode we speak with Catherine Mahoney about the recent UK Giving Report from the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF).
1. Giving is up but givers are down
It’s a little disconcerting to hear that there are so many fewer donors here in the UK compared to previous years, we’re not sure if this is also being seen in other countries too.
However, total giving seems to have gone up, showing that those who are giving seem to be giving more. What we don’t know is why. If we look at the growing wealth gap in our society, and the job losses that have come from the pandemic, the vast furlough scheme which has given many people less over much of the last two years, this might give us some idea.
2. Would could charities do to overcome giving fatigue?
So while the pot may not be getting smaller, the loss of so many donors suggests that competition for support may be on the increase. It would be useful to understand more from charities about whether their funds have gone down or whether their supporter numbers have gone down and they are just seeing larger average gifts. We also don’t know how the emergency appeals of the pandemic will continue to perform, some believe that giving fatigue is setting in, or will do in the short-term.
What does this mean for charities. Well one thing is that we need to continue to find ways of establishing long-lasting and thereby cost-effective relationships with supporters. Providing an authentic personal interaction, along with a reciprocal donor-centred approach to fundraising to help bring supporters into our cause and to live the passion that we, and our colleagues hold for it. With less resource, funding, time and energy this serves to be big challenge for many of us. And so, we must seek out within ourselves and from those around us the support we need to remain resilient, innovative and passionate.
3. The UK Giving Report from CAF
The UK Giving Report from CAF – https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/about-us-research/uk_giving_report_2021.pdf
This episode of Charity Chat has been brought to you by our platinum sponsor, fundraising platform Work for Good and the festive Small Business Star match funding campaign. This year there is a £50,000 match funding pot available. Head to www.workforgood.co.uk to sign-up for free!