Community foundations in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Milton Keynes are working together to turn the proceeds of crime into grants that reduce reoffending, prevent social problems and build community resilience.
Today Comic Relief and community foundations across the UK announce a new £2 million investment into supporting small, community-led organisations, which will play a vital role supporting people to make positive changes in their lives and their local communities.
OCF has just published its audited accounts for the financial year 2016–17, which show that we made £847,017 in grants to 122 different charitable organisations. We also increased our donations by 24% by bringing in several important new partners.
OCF is seeking applications to the High Sheriff’s Community Integration Awards. The awards are grants of up to £5,000, given for work that brings together communities usually divided by ethnicity, age or social background.
The Good Exchange is an online platform that enables the auto-matching of grant applications to a funder’s specific grant giving criteria. Starting with a focus on homelessness, applications to OCF’s grants programmes will soon be automatically shared with other funders on The Good Exchange.
OCF’s June grants panel awarded 23 grants totalling nearly £38,000. Funding was directed to hard-to-reach young people and isolated elderly residents of some of the more deprived areas across Oxfordshire.
Anne-Marie Cockburn’s daughter Martha Fernback died four years ago this week of an MDMA overdose. Now she is building on her work on restorative justice and forgiveness by piloting a new project that will teach teenagers to make good decisions.
High Sheriff of Oxfordshire Jane Cranston will hold an online auction in association with Mallams to raise money for local charities that are tackling crime prevention, offender rehabilitation and victim support. She is now seeking donations of auction lots to help raise as much as possible.
Around 50 companies have shared their passion for their local area by publishing pledges for charitable and community activities they will undertake over the coming year. The businesses are all members of OCF’s responsible business group Reciprocate.
Thanks to the generosity of some key donors, OCF was able to boost the government- and lottery-funded Youth Social Action Fund by 172%, meaning we could make 15 grants totalling £72,870 to local charities leading the way in engaging young people.