Community Organisers are delighted to have been awarded £60k of funding from Big Potential under their Big Potential Advanced Programme. The money will be used to support them to become contract and investment ready, so that they can create opportunities to develop and enhance the community organising agenda.
CEO Nick Gardham said “This is a huge step forward for COLtd. It will allow us to build capacity within our organisation that will allow us to compete and win contracts. This will go a long way towards securing the future of the Community Organisers network.”
Community Organisers will be supported by a Big Potential Approved Provider, Bidright UK, a national bid-writing and contract readiness consultancy specialising in winning large contracts for social ventures. Bidright’s MD, Sally-ann Baker is keen to support such an innovative organisation that makes a real difference to local communities at grass-roots level; “We look forward to supporting Community Organisers to win funding to train a further 3500 local area catalysts per year. What a difference that would make to lives of the most vulnerable!”
Big Potential
Big Potential is a Big Lottery Fund grant programme that will deliver approximately £20m of grant funding over three years to eligible Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprise (VCSE) organisations with the aim of improving their sustainability, capacity and scale in order that they may deliver greater social impact.
The programme has two routes: Breakthrough and Advanced. Big Potential Breakthrough helps VCSE organisations work out how social investment might work for them. Big Potential Advanced helps VCSE organisations with strong proposals apply for investment or challenge for contracts.
Big Potential is administered by the Social Investment Business for the Big Lottery Fund, in partnership with Locality, Charity Bank, Social Enterprise UK, and the University of Northampton.
