The Seed Fund

The Seed Fund is to initiate projects that support people with invisible disabilities to live well in their community, addressing loneliness and reducing social isolation.

A key factor to living well with an invisible disability is being able to maintain your existing lifestyle as much as possible for as long as possible. Some people start to change their usual routines after being diagnosed and withdraw from their community. This may leave them or family carers isolated or lonely. Staying part of a community and continuing activities, pastimes and hobbies can result in less stress, anxiety and frustration for both the person with a diagnosis and their family.

You can apply for up to £2000 per application.

Eligibility

All applications must be for projects that:

• address loneliness for those with an invisible disability and their carers
• reduce social isolation for those with an invisible disability and their carers
• work with local businesses, organisations, leisure, sports or arts to help those with an invisible disability remain part of the community and maintain their pastimes, hobbies and activities
• have 50% of the total cost secured though match funding, either financial or in kind (such as donated location, staff time, materials and equipment)
• demonstrate that consideration has been given to longer term sustainability, as this is one-off seed funding and will not be available in future
• develop existing partnerships and encourage new partnerships between various sectors of the community
• be promoted to those living with an invisible disability as well as local businesses and organisations
• will be appropriately monitored and evaluated, including case studies where appropriate, to enable other organisations to benefit and support future development of opportunities.

Greater consideration will be given to funding applications for projects which have:

• intergenerational and/or community group involvement
• arts, culture, sports or leisure activities
• assistive technology and aids
• business and retail sector involvement.

Timescales

We will be in touch to let you know if your application has been successful and provide details of the next steps if so.

Apply

Applications closed on 31 January 2022.

After you've applied

To distribute the funding fairly across the county, we will judge projects against others within the same district and award to the highest scoring within a geographic location. The total number awarded will be dependent on the value of the funding applied for. If there is a lack of applications in some districts, we will try to ensure that we award a fair distribution of funding across the remaining districts.

Once an application has been received, we will evaluate it and score it using a scale of 0 to 4 where 0 = didn’t answer the question at all and 4 = answered the question and demonstrated added value.

Projects need to meet a passing threshold, which is 2 points for each question. Projects failing to score 2 for each question will fail.