There are many funding opportunities for communities, businesses, and organisations, a number of funding portals exists for each of these areas which I hope you will find useful.
Funding Scotland:
Find funding for your charity, community group or social enterprise using the Funding Scotland search engine:
Scottish EU Funding Portal
There is a significant amount of funding available to Scottish businesses, organisations, and communities from the EU, the Scottish EU Funding Portal provides a collation of these funding opportunities across different fields such as sustainability and Enterprise:
Scottish EU Funding Portal Website
Energy Reduction Funding for SMEs
A number of grant and loan opportunities are available to help small to medium businesses in reducing their energy and resource costs by providing assistance with assessments, training, and equipment purchase.
The Carbon Trust Green Business Fund: Grants for energy assessments, training workshops, equipment procurement support and up to £5,000 capital contribution per company towards your energy saving equipment purchase.
SME Green Loans: Scottish Government Interest-free loans from £1k to £100k to help with energy reduction equipment:
National Lottery Funding for Year of Young People
Local community and sports groups across Scotland can benefit from National Lottery good cause cash, as part of a new £550,000 fund, aimed at helping change the lives of young people.
The Year of Young People National Lottery Fund is now open and is a joint scheme from Scotland’s National Lottery distributors, Big Lottery Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund, sportscotland, and Spirit of 2012 a UK Trust endowed with Big Lottery funds. It offers funding of between £3,000 and £10,000 to heritage, community and sports projects that are run for and by young people aged eight to 26 years old and that improve their health and wellbeing.
The available pot of £550,000 is for projects that:
- Encourage positive mental health for young people;
- Inspire young people to lead active lives;
- Involve young people in the development, design, running and evaluation of the project
- Celebrate and share young people’s achievements.
This new funding is aimed at voluntary or community organisations as well as youth groups, youth associations and other non profit organisations. Schools are also eligible to apply. There are two application deadlines – 30 April 2018 and 18 June 2018 – and groups will get an answer on their application within eight weeks.
For more information and an online application form groups should visit national-lottery-yoyp.org.uk where they will find more information about this unique scheme from the National Lottery.
Groups can also contact YOYPFund@hlf.org.uk or 0131 225 9450 for more details or support with their application.
