Grant opportunities for Sustainable Food Places members

We are pleased to announce two new grant opportunities for Sustainable Food Places members. The first involves a limited number of Emergency Support Grants that are designed to support members where an immediate threat to coordinator funding and capacity is putting the existence and/or effective operation of the local SFP partnership and programme at risk. The second is an invitation for expressions of interest from members interested in piloting initiatives to build a local good food movement. Please read the following descriptions and eligibility criteria carefully to determine if these opportunities are right for your partnership, and send any inquiries to sfcgrants@soilassociation.org. 

Emergency Support Grants

Eligibility criteria:

• Sustainable Food Places member.

• Have been active in the last six months. This must include core partnership activities but can include Covid-19 response delivery.

•  Have existing coordinator capacity (paid or voluntary).

•  Do not have a coordinator employed by a local authority.

• Are not currently funded by, have previously applied for, or have had the opportunity to apply for, an SFP Phase 3 Bronze to Silver Coordinator Grant or Silver to Gold Coordinator Grant.

• Are immediately vulnerable with regards to coordinator capacity and require this grant in order to continue their work for the coming 6 to 12 months.

Grant amount: £5,000

Application deadline: July 2nd 2020 9:00 AM BST

We are aware that some Sustainable Food Places partnerships have become vulnerable during the Covid-19 pandemic as resources and attention have rightly been diverted towards vital emergency response work and as funding and support for wider food work become more uncertain. Sustainable Food Places is therefore offering a small number of Emergency Support Grants of up to £5,000 each to eligible food partnerships to maintain their capacity and momentum through the Covid-19 crisis.

These grants are for currently active partnerships and must contribute towards existing coordinator capacity and where that capacity is at immediate risk. They are only available to partnerships where coordinators are not employed by a local authority, and that have not had the opportunity to apply for Phase 3 coordinator grants to date. Priority will be for currently active partnerships but where the future of that partnership is clearly at risk due to a lack of sufficient coordinator capacity.

You can find the application form here. 

Good Food Movement Grants

Eligibility criteria:

• Sustainable Food Places member.

Grant amount: £5,000

Application deadline: July 2nd 2020 9:00 AM BST

Sustainable Food Places (SFP) is embarking on Phase 3 of its programme. One of the key strands in Phase 3 is about helping partnerships to nurture, support and sustain local good food movements, reaching out to new audiences and enabling them to connect, communicate and collaborate as active food citizens as they work together to transform their local food system. The first step to achieving this will be a test and learn phase. This small round of grants is for pilot initiatives, trying out approaches and gathering learning before opening the grant and support opportunity out to the wider SFP Network in 2021.

We are interested in any and every idea that can help bring people together to play an active, ongoing role in their local community and their local food system that contributes and is connected to the work of your local food partnership. We are therefore calling for expressions of interest from members that are interested in working with the SFP national team to develop and test initiatives. These projects should aim to drive a step change in sustained local participation in good food action. We are offering between up to 6 grants of £5,000 each to be spent within 12 months. If you can show match funding or in-kind contributions to support your proposed initiative it will add to the strength of your application, but this is not a requirement.

To manage down the time and effort of prospective applicants, we are only asking for expressions of interest at this stage. We will then invite those with ideas that seem most relevant and most replicable to submit a more detailed application before making a final decision on which pilots to fund.

You can find the expression of interest form here.