Grants awarded

Heart of the Community Fund

The Heart of the Community Fund launched in 2018 to support community regeneration in the cities home to a Virgin Money Lounge; Glasgow, Sheffield, Norwich, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Manchester and London.

Every three months three local community organisations from each of the cities are given the chance to receive £2,000 - with awards of £1,000 and £500 for two runners-up.

The awards are voted for by Virgin Money customers. There is a voting unit in each of the Lounges and visitors can pick up a small red heart when they visit, to put into the tube named with the community organisation they'd most like to support.

North East Fund

In 2015, the Virgin Money Foundation launched the North East Fund, delivered with funding from the UK Government. Between August 2015 and November 2018, we invited applications from community organisations working to promote long-term change in those North East neighbourhoods that need it the most.

We funded organisations that:

• Help young people find and keep a job.
• Enable people at risk of homelessness to secure a home.
• Develop new and ambitious community enterprises, providing a social and economic benefit.

The North East Fund awarded grants between £10,000 and £50,000 to cover the running costs of these initiatives. Between 2015 and 2019, we awarded over £4 million to 78 community organisations.

43 awards, totalling £1,639,913, were made to organisations working with people experiencing homelessness. 50 awards were given to organisations supporting young people into work, with a total of £1,900,966. 21 awards, totalling £727,159, were offered to social enterprises.

The North East Fund is now closed.

Ripple Fund

The Ripple Fund was delivered between 2016 and 2018. It supported sustainable regeneration in communities by funding activity that would’ve had a ripple effect beyond its own neighbourhood. This inspired lasting change, strengthened the local economy and offered secondary benefits too.

The Ripple Fund was the Foundation’s largest grants programme. Between 2017 and 2018, we awarded £1.5 million to eight organisations.

The Ripple Fund is now closed.

#iwill Take Action Fund

The #iwill Take Action Fund was a £1.7 million fund provided between 2017 and 2019. It was designed to support young people become changemakers.

The Virgin Money Foundation matched the £850,000 from the #iwill fund. This was made up of joint investment from the National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. All in all, this created the magnificent £1.7million, three-year #iwill Take Action Fund. We backed organisations that:

• Helped young people to improve their communities.
• Encouraged young people to tackle health issues affecting their local area.
• Supported young people to use art and media as a tool to raise awareness of the issues that matter to them and their communities.

The #iwill Take Action Fund offered grants of £10,000 to £150,000 to organisations supporting young people making change happen in their locality. Between 2017 and 2019, we awarded 28 grants to organisations across the North East of England.

The #iwill Take Action Fund is now closed.

You can find out more about the #iwill campaign and the #iwill fund here.

Making a Splash Fund

The Making a Splash grants programme supported voluntary, community and social enterprises across Norfolk that wanted to find new ways of generating income or working in the community.

During 2018, nine grants were awarded. We paired funded organisations with a skilled Virgin Money volunteer so they could maximise the benefit of their relationship with the Virgin Money Foundation.

The Making a Splash Fund is now closed.

Open data

The Virgin Money Foundation is committed to being transparent and we work with 360Giving to publish information about our grants. We believe that with better information, grantmakers can make more effective decisions. 360Giving provides support for them to publish data openly, understand that data and use it to create online tools to make grantmaking more beneficial. For more information, visit http://www.threesixtygiving.org

Using the 360Giving data standard, our grants are available as a .csv here.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The data must be attributed to Virgin Money Foundation.

Living Wage Funder

The Virgin Money Foundation is proud to be a Living Wage Funder. Living Wage Funders are committed to tackle low pay by encouraging and enabling the organisations they support to pay the real Living Wage. The real Living Wage is an independently calculated, voluntary rate of pay that is based on the actual cost of living. It is different from the government’s ‘National Living Wage’, which is the legal minimum for over 25s. Nearly 6,000 employers now choose to pay the real Living Wage to all their staff and are accredited as a Living Wage Employer. The Living Wage Foundation would like to see the real Living Wage become the norm in every sector and believes the voluntary sector can lead the way.