Managing Money Better – Comic Relief’s Older People's Programme

Comic Relief has a long standing commitment to working with older people. Our focus has been on ensuring the needs of older people are met, their rights upheld and their skills and experience used and valued.

We know that currently one in five older people are living below the poverty line and many lack access to good, independent financial advice. The increasing complexity of accessing benefits, the growing number of financial services being offered online, the rising cost of living and soaring energy prices, are all factors resulting in older people facing increased financial exclusion.

Aim of the programme

The programme aims to help older people cope with the challenges of this particularly harsh financial climate by designing new and improved ways for them to build their knowledge and skills to manage money more effectively, to guard against financial scams and abuse, and to cope better with cold homes and rising fuel prices.

Outcomes

The work will need to deliver one or more of the following outcomes for older people to:

• Manage their money more effectively
• Increase their income
• Experience less fuel poverty
• Deal better with financial distress (such as abuse and scams)
• Feel more confident in accessing IT and online financial services

For the final round of funding within the current grants strategy, we will give priority to projects that are enabling older people to access and use computers and the internet to increase their financial management skills. Especially those that are being developed in partnership with voluntary sector organisations and banks, credit unions, energy companies, IT providers and others, to recognise and respond better to their needs. The programme will aim to support projects that address some of the challenges older people often feel in using computers and projects that are developing technologies for older people with differing levels of ability.

For this final round of funding in our current grants strategy, we will prioritise applications that:

• Involve older people. This could be through involving older people in the design of the proposal, in the design of technology and assessing what forms of technology are most valuable to the group, in a steering group or supporting their peers who are less active as volunteer mentors, tutors or champions
• Test and disseminate new approaches
• Target the most isolated older people who live in the poorest and most deprived areas and who are traditionally hard to reach
• Have strategic partnership approaches already in place with voluntary, private and public organisations and local people of all ages at the time of application.

Please note that partners who are simply referral partners or allow their centres to be used to deliver activity are not sufficient to meet the programme criteria.

Other important information

The maximum grant size for this programme is £180,000 over three years. We will not consider applications for less than £10,000 under this programme.

Applications for under £10,000 are managed through our Local Communities programme, run by the Community Foundation Network.

The Programme opens for 1st stage on-line applications from 13th August until midday on 28th September 2012. Successful Stage 1 applicants will be notified by early November and invited to submit a Stage 2 application within 3 weeks of notification.

If you would like to talk to us about whether your work meets our criteria, please email us at: ukgrants@comicrelief.com or call us on 020 7820 2000 and ask to speak to a member of staff from the Older People’s programme.