Supporting Small Charity Week

This week we’re celebrating Small Charities Week by highlighting the impact some of our activities have had in supporting grass roots organisations that embody our shared values and provide essential services to our communities with very limited resources.

Our climate change and risk education grant programme is now open for applications

With climate change at the top of the agenda in recent weeks, supporting small charities who are working hard to tackle climate change and preserve conservation, or driving risk education and behaviour change to help us live safer lives has never been more important.

Our new grant programme is open to applications from registered charities, community groups and community interest companies until 2 July 2021, and RSA plans to send grants of up to £10,000 to successful applicants by the end of July 2021.

To secure a grant, charities will need to demonstrate their projects are tackling climate change, conservation, and offsetting carbon emissions. It is also open to charities with programmes that share RSA’s ambition to improve risk education for road, home, cycle and online safety, as well as child safety, ideally driving behaviour change.

Details on how to apply and the full entry criteria are available here.

Tackling the digital divide

This year we have seen how vital access to technology is for education, personal development and keeping in touch with loved ones when they’re far away. Sadly, many children and young people have struggled to access remote learning due to not having access to a computer, or the internet, at home. We also saw many older people suffering isolation from loneliness as they spent extended periods of time indoors on their own.

We’ve been so pleased to be able to put our own IT upgrade project to good use and donate 1125 laptops to causes supporting young people’s education and tackling the digital divide for older people.

Celebrating the contribution of small charities across the UK  

Neighbourly reported a 7% increase in the numbers of causes needing support since November, most likely due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

RSA has long supported the work of local causes which is why our community grant programme was created in the summer of 2020 to provide much needed support to charities who were hit hard by the pandemic.

We provided a total of 168 charities with much-needed cash support which meant that charities could provide support to 26,764 people at a local level.

Thank you for being our #communityheroes