What is the Third Sector Capacity Fund?

The purpose of the Third Sector Capacity Fund is to provide financial support to enable third sector organisations to engage at a strategic level in economic regeneration and associated activities which support the aims of the North East’s Regional Economic Strategy (RES).

The overall aims of the Third Sector Capacity Fund are to:

• Build the capacity of the third sector to engage and contribute strategically to sustainable economic development;
• Grow and demonstrate the contribution that the third sector makes to sustainable economic development;
• Develop or expand activities that lead to greater financial and/or organisational sustainability within third sector organisations.

Policy context

The third sector has an important role to play in economic regeneration across the UK as a whole and the North East of England in particular.  This has been recognised both at a:

• national level – in the Government’s recent review of the future role of the third sector in social and economic regeneration; and
• regional level with an explicit commitment to the sector playing their part in delivering the RES (through contributing to key priorities such as tackling worklessness and deprivation, re-engaging deprived groups and places and promoting equality and diversity in under-represented group).

Building the capacity of the sector

The Government has invested significant amounts of money in building the capacity of the sector, not least through the ChangeUp programme.

It is imperative that applications under the Third Sector Capacity Fund complement the policies and priorities of other national, regional and sub-regional capacity-building programmes in order to promote efficient distribution, achieve synergy, help cut waste (including unnecessary duplication) and drive down administration costs.

For further guidance and information on complementary initiatives and investment in the third sector please refer to the North East Regional Infrastructure Development Group’s Meta Plan 2008-2014.

Management and oversight of the Third Sector Capacity Fund

In order to support the Fund’s managing agent, a strategic reference group and a grant assessment panel have been established. To find out more about the grants panel, you can download their terms of reference.

Outputs and outcomes

In addition to identifying their anticipated key outcomes all projects will need to contribute to some or all of the following outputs:

• Jobs created
• Jobs safeguarded
• Match funding
• Skills opportunities of over 6 hours
• Employment Support (Number of people assisted to get a job)

More detailed outputs guidance (including relevant definitions) can be found here