Oxfordshire Community Foundation (OCF) is pleased to announce the appointment of Adrian Sell as CEO. Adrian was appointed Interim CEO on 1st July, taking on the challenge of leading OCF with a focus on using its Resilience Fund to help the voluntary sector in Oxfordshire respond better and recover stronger from the pandemic.
The Westgate Fund was established in 2017 with a £125,000 donation from John Lewis, and is held and managed by Oxfordshire Community Foundation (OCF). Since then it has funded 18 different community initiatives across Oxford.
OCF hosted a webinar this week, focusing on the opportunities to tackle homelessness, following the national ‘everyone in’ policy at the start of lockdown. The webinar, timed in the week of World Homeless Day, also looked at how the partners in Oxfordshire Homeless Movement are responding locally.
OCF has awarded grants, totalling over £58,000 and supporting nearly 32,000 people, as part of a funding round to support COVID-19 response and recovery. These grants, funded from our Community Resilience Fund, aimed to give smaller organisations vital funding as they continue to respond to the pandemic, or enter the recovery phase.
Age friendly partners are holding an event at Banbury market on Thursday 1st October, 9am to 2pm, to celebrate International Day of Older Persons. They will be handing out free goodie bags for older residents, including lots of useful local information and the Age Friendly Banbury pin. On the same day, the Age Friendly Business Pledge is also launching.
In August, we invited small charities and community groups to apply for up to £2,000 of grant funding to support grassroots responses to the pandemic. The scale of applications received shows that the immediate crisis is far from over, and that communities urgently need more financial support.
How can we ensure that no school-age child in Oxfordshire falls further behind due to lack of digital resources? Oxfordshire Community Foundation (OCF) commissioned Oxford University’s Student Consultancy to measure the size of the digital exclusion problem, and consider solutions.
Following positive and constructive feedback from our survey, OCF’s webinars series will continue over the coming months, taking a deep dive into issues affecting our communities in the fall-out of COVID-19. We talk to subject-matter experts, charities on the frontline and funders about how we can bring people together to tackle isolation, homelessness, educational disadvantage and digital exclusion, whilst facing up to the economic fallout of the crisis.
Having made online statistical mapping tool Local Insights freely available in April, we have now updated the data sets and area reports. The latest data is showing the economic impacts of COVID-19 locally.
Could you take three minutes to complete our survey and help shape future webinars?