Aims/priorities: Better Youth Spaces is £30.5m of capital grants funded by the UK Government and administered by Social Investment Business. The grant funding is to be used for small scale-capital projects of £5k-£100k, including capital equipment, small refurbishments and other capital projects to help youth organisations to better support the young people they work with. The project must meet at least one of the fund objectives:
- Improving the reach of activities provided.
- Improving the safety of existing youth facilities.
- Improve the youth sector’s capacity and quality to deliver a range of enrichment activities.
- Improving the financial sustainability of youth facilities.
Who can apply? In addition to the geographic eligibility we will only consider applications from organisations that:
Are set up as:
- Charities registered with the Charity Commission;
- Not-for-profit companies (including Community Interest Companies (CICs) and Companies Limited by Guarantee (CLGs) with dividend, asset and mission lock) registered with Companies House;
- Local Authorities (where they provide youth services);
- Uniformed organisations; or
- Community Benefit Societies.
- Are working with children and young people, with at least 50% of their provision being for children/ young people aged up to 18; and a significant proportion of the offering being open access youth provision for children and young people aged 11 to 18 years (or up to 25 years if they have special educational needs or disabilities, are leaving care, or considered ‘at risk’ or vulnerable);
- Are applying for a project/s that meets at least one of the fund objectives;
- Have been actively operating for at least two years and have at least one set of annual financial accounts;
- Have a bank account in the name of the applicant organisation;
- Have at least two unrelated governing body directors/ trustees/ committee members;
- Comply with SIB’s Safeguarding Policy;
- Can cash flow the project from their own resources (grants are paid in arrears);
- Can, spend the grant and provide eligible evidence of spend within a 1-4 month timeframe (to be agreed during the grant set up).
Grant amount: Minimum of £5,000 and a maximum of £100,000 per site (not per organisation).
- Can include both equipment, vehicle and refurbishment costs.
- Individual items of equipment must be £2,000 or greater in value. Multiples of identical (i.e. the exact same) items with a cumulative value of £2,000 or greater purchased in a single transaction are also eligible.
- Different items can be grouped together to meet the £2,000 threshold if they are interdependent (needed together for a single purpose/function) and purchased from the same supplier on a single invoice. The £2,000 value can include delivery, installation, and related professional fees.
- Maximum size of any grant for refurbishment purposes is £50k. Please note that the total refurbishment project must cost £50k or less on a stand-alone basis and not have dependencies within a larger & higher costs refurbishment or building project.
Application process: Before you start the form, we strongly recommend you:
- Carefully read the detailed Application Form Guidance and list of Eligible & Ineligible Expenditure.
- Collect together all the required documents (listed below), and
- Then start the online application form.
This will make completing the form a lot quicker and easier. If you have done this and have all required information to hand and ready to upload, the form will take at least one hour to complete.
If you don’t include all of the requested information with your application, you include ineligible items of spend or what you are applying for doesn’t appear feasible within the fund timelines, your application (or part of it) might be rejected.
Deadline: Applications that include refurbishment will have a short, fixed window to apply which will close at midnight on Sunday 31 August.
The application window for all other applications will close at midnight on Sunday 21 September.
Contact information: Email: bys@sibgroup.org.uk
Website: https://www.sibgroup.org.uk/funds/better-youth-spaces/#what-is-better-youth-spaces