Aim of the fund

The aim of the Housing & Homelessness Fund 2025 is to support voluntary and community sector organisations serving those who are homeless or housing insecure, through developing their capacity to support their service users.

Grants will be made available in two stages. Stage 1 is focused on supporting capacity building and developmental work. Applicants who are funded through this phase and who successfully complete their capacity building projects, will be invited to apply for further funding to support direct service delivery under Stage 2.

Achieving the aim

Your proposed activity or project needs to show how it will enable significant change to occur in the capacity of your voluntary or community organisation. This change must result in demonstrated benefits being delivered by your organisation (directly or indirectly) to the individuals or communities you support.

A useful definition of ‘capacity building’ comes from the American National Council of Nonprofits [language adapted to reflect UK circumstances]:

“Capacity building is whatever is needed to bring a voluntary or community group to the next level of operational, programmatic, financial, or organisational maturity, so it may more effectively and efficiently advance its mission into the future. Capacity building is not a one-time effort to improve short-term effectiveness, but a continuous improvement strategy towards the creation of a sustainable and effective organisation.”

Building capacity could therefore mean an enhancement in skills or knowledge within your organisation, it could mean increased reach, scaling up or across, diversifying services, building collaborations to deliver efficiency, strengthening your structures and processes, or strengthening your organisation’s reputation or connections – but, importantly, in a planned and strategic fashion that will deliver sustainable change. We are therefore not necessarily seeking end-to-end projects to be delivered in the period of the grant (which is relatively short). If a short-term project can be shown to deliver significant change in a group’s capability, then it will be eligible, but so will more general development activity, which may be part of a longer-term process of change within a group or organisation.

Criteria

Your Organisation

You must be focused on serving those who are homeless or housing insecure. This may include refugees and asylum seekers, people in the criminal justice system, people with mental health needs, women, and/or young people.

We will prioritise strong applications from organisations which can demonstrate active commitment to lived experience engagement.

NB successful applicants will be supported in developing the lived experience components of their working practices.

The Grants

Organisations should be addressing at least one of the priority areas below:

Renter rights

Help renters on low incomes to access decent homes at genuinely affordable rent levels;
Support renters in enforcing their rights, including in relation to tenancies, disrepair and preventing eviction
Uncover and challenge discrimination which excludes people from accessing affordable and safe homes.

Outcome – More renters are able to access their housing rights and live in decent and affordable

Supply and access to genuinely affordable and decent homes

Campaign to improve supply of homes that are affordable for people with the lowest income and/or facing the most discrimination;
Support different models of community ownership that benefit people with the greatest housing need; and
Empower communities to advocate for more homes that meet housing need.

Outcome – Increased supply of new and existing genuinely affordable and decent homes

Reduction and prevention of homelessness

Empower and support people through services that break the cycle of homelessness;
Develop stronger advocacy and campaigning to prevent all forms of homelessness;

Outcome – People are supported to avoid homelessness

Grants Available

Capacity building grants will be offered between £10,000 – £25,000 for a duration of up to two years.

Whilst the following is not an exhaustive list, we would expect to see some clear impact in at least one of these areas:

A better understanding of your business model and finances;
A better understanding of how to access and/or develop other sources of income e.g. grants, contracts, trading etc;
An expanded and/or more efficient and effective service offer;
Leadership and governance;
Improved management systems;
Improved impact measurement systems;
Better strategic planning;
Building collaborative approaches;
Strengthening networks.
Essentially, we want to ‘unlock’ potential in organisations.

Demonstrating Change

We expect grant applicants to have systems in place to be able to effectively monitor the outcomes of the work funded by this grant.

Successful applicants to the Fund will need to be able to demonstrate at the full application stage the thinking behind their bid, the changes they are seeking to make, how the changes will be delivered, and how their organisation will be different as a result of the grant. They will also need to articulate what results these changes will have for the individuals or communities they support – directly or indirectly – and, ideally, be able to show how they will measure the anticipated results at the end of the grant period.

Eligibility

As indicated above, the Fund will award grants to capacity-building activity that impacts upon organisations that address housing and homelessness issues.

Whilst we have not set a maximum organisational income level, we will prioritise applications from smaller local organisations (taking in to account the applicant’s local knowledge and their embeddedness in the community, as well as annual turnover and reserves). We are looking to support organisations that have enough existing capacity to be able to develop, therefore we will prioritise offering funding to organisations with at least one member of paid staff.

The fund will be open to organisations with charitable purposes who aim to support people who are homeless or housing insecure in Northern Ireland.

It is anticipated that seven grants will be awarded.

Funding is flexible and we are content to approve whatever costs organisations may need, however, we anticipate some of the following may form part of a request for support: