Regional briefing sessions for Transition Fund

The Cabinet Office has launched a new £100million Transition Fund to help the charities, voluntary groups and social enterprises that are affected by public spending cuts to make necessary adjustments so that they can continue to play an important part in public service reform and the Big Society Agenda.

The Transition Fund will help civil society organisations which deliver high quality public services to be more resilient, agile and able to take opportunities presented by a changing funding environment.

The Office for Civil Society has appointed BIG Fund (non-Lottery funding operation of the Big Lottery Fund) to administer the fund. The BIG Fund are holding briefing events in the West Midlands for civil society organisations which meet the criteria below and are interested in applying to the Transition Fund.

The briefing events are open to charities, voluntary groups and social enterprises which meet the following criteria:

1. Civil society organisations with an income of between £50,000 and £10 million
2. At least 60% of your income is from taxpayer funded sources
3. You must spend at least 50% of your taxpayer funded income on service provision in at least one of the following areas – health and social care; homelessness; education and training; offender rehabilitation; welfare to work/ employment services; children and families; debt counselling and legal advice
4. Your free reserves must not be more than six months
5. You face significant cuts; you will experience cuts of least 30% of your taxpayer funded income in 2011/12, as compared to your most recent set of signed annual accounts
6. The minimum grant size is £12.5k and grants will meet no more than half your taxpayer funded income. This means that you will have lost at least £25k
7. The majority of the grant expenditure will be on change activities
8. You are delivering the majority of your services in England.

UPDATE: BIG has confirmed that the Transition Fund will not be made available for infrastructure organisations.
Source: Civil Society Media

If you are unable to attend a briefing session, all of the information you need on eligibility and applying is available on the BIG Fund's website.