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Grants for voluntary and community organisations

Grants for voluntary and community organisations

The Bristol Impact Fund

From July 2017 we brought eight of the council’s grant funds together to form a new, four year programme called the Bristol Impact Fund.

The Bristol Impact Fund aims to:

  • reduce disadvantage and inequality
  • improve health and wellbeing
  • increase resilience by providing grant investment for life improving projects that empower some of the city’s most disadvantaged people

The Bristol Impact Fund has been fully allocated for this round of funding. Although, we’re consulting about a second Bristol Impact Fund which will run from July 2021 to June 2025.

Current grants run until June 2021 for medium to large grants and until January 2022 for small grants.

We’ll update this page when new grant opportunities are available and also advertise them widely through Voscur and other networks.

Current grant opportunities

Bristol Impact Fund round two

We’re proposing to deliver a second Bristol Impact Fund programme. This is a four year grant funding programme that would provide significant investment for the city’s voluntary, community and social enterprise sector.

Building on the success of the first impact fund, its ambition is to grow city resilience by growing the power of communities experiencing the greatest inequality.

The first Bristol Impact Fund

The first Bristol Impact Fund runs from July 2017 to June 2021.

The first round of the Bristol Impact Fund offered two levels of grants:

  • medium/large BIF grants, funding projects for 4 years, from July 2017 to June 2021
  • small BIF grants, funding projects for 2 years, from July 2017 to June 2019

We used our new grants processes to decide how to allocate the Bristol Impact Fund. Since its launch, 70 organisations have received grants and 7,000 volunteers have been involved in projects that have:

  • reduced financial, food and fuel poverty
  • tackled unemployment
  • increased digital inclusion
  • enabled people to better participate in their community
  • reduced social isolation
  • improved wellbeing

To find out what organisations and projects we fund and what the council has grant funded in the past, see our Published information about our grant funding.

Evaluation

To show the impact that projects are having, in early 2020 we commissioned an independent evaluation of the first two years of the Bristol Impact Fund (pdf, 857KB) (opens new window) .

Small Grants 2020/2021

We ran a second round of small grants for two years from January 2020 to December 2021.

Find details of the projects that received funding from January 2020 to December 2021. (pdf, 87KB) (opens new window)

Baseline standards

We've developed a set of baseline standards to safeguard our investment in the voluntary and community sector. This will also ensure that all council funded organisations are well managed and provide good quality services.

Baseline Standards: Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise Organisations

Further information

Our approach to grant funding is explained in the VCS Grants Prospectus:

Information about the council’s arts and culture funding is available from the Arts and Culture Funding webpages.

The Bristol Impact Fund was used as a case study by the Institute for Voluntary Action Research to develop a framework for place-based funding approaches.

If  you any have questions, email investmentandgrants@bristol.gov.uk.

Elsewhere on the web