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Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund

The Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund was a £14 million fund to support the growth of innovations that mobilise people’s energy and talents to help each other, working alongside public services.Show more

Why did we do this?

Whether we call it formal or informal volunteering, giving, social action or simply ‘people helping people’, spending some of your time in the service of others is a deeply ingrained part of our culture. We think social action has a key role to play in augmenting public services, from community networks supporting older people to live well and peer networks for people living with long term health conditions, to young people helping their peers navigate job and training opportunities.

What did we do?

The Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund (CSAIF) was a partnership between Nesta and the Cabinet Office. From April 2013 to March 2016, we supported over 50 organisations across England to develop and grow the reach and impact of social action innovations mobilising people’s time, energy and talents to help each other, working alongside public services.

In total, we received more that 1,400 expressions of interest and we backed more than 52 innovations, investing £11.5m in grants and a further £3m in non-financial advice and support, including rigorous evaluation of the outcomes for the people helped by these innovations.

We worked with innovations in six priority areas where there was a plausible case for how social action could make a difference, and where we felt that the current solutions were underused.

Click on the priority areas below to read more about the portfolio:

  • Helping older people to live well
  • Helping people with long-term health conditions to live well
  • Supporting young people to succeed and find employment
  • Using “impact volunteering” to support and improve public services
  • Helping unemployed people improve their skills and get back to work
  • Using digital technology to get people involved in social action

We also ran two replication programmes to incentivise public services to adopt proven impact volunteering model models - Cities of Service UK and Helping in Hospitals.

The background

One of Nesta’s current strategic priorities is citizen engagement in public services. Over the past few years we have supported innovators in this space through People Powered Health, Innovation in Giving, Creative Councils and our work on Co-production. The Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund was the largest programme to date and builds on this legacy.

Want to know more?

Our work with grantees ended on the 31 March 2016. The final learning reports from the fund will be available in late October 2016, and will be published here.

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Evidence base

Find out about the impact achieved by the organisations we supported through the fund

Portfolio evaluations

Our partner

We're proud to have worked with...

Who worked on this?

Meet the team behind this project

Vicki Sellick
Mandeep Hothi
Carrie Deacon
Lynette Lucas

Who worked on this?

Meet the team behind this project

Halima Khan
Catherine Russell
Katy Rutherford
Jullie Tran Graham
Annie Finnis
Daniel Jones
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Supporting successful social action innovators to scale further

As part of the continuing partnership between Nesta and the Office for Civil Society, we have awarded further funding to a limited number of high performing projects from the portfolio
Chris Norris
Tuesday, 2 May 2017
Chris Norris
2

Validated! The positive impact of using validated tools

Gina Floyd, Evaluation and Impact Officer at RNIB, on the positive impact of using validated tools in service evaluations.
Gina Floyd
Wednesday, 9 November 2016
Gina Floyd
0

To date, 26,637 students have been mentored by @CityYear, one of the projects supported by CSAIF: https://t.co/WmGwK8SK2w #pplhelpingppl pic.twitter.com/6BqMOU0njw

— Nesta, UK (@nesta_uk) October 31, 2016

Really proud to feature in the new People Helping People social action innovations report from @nesta_uk #pplhelpingppl pic.twitter.com/NtRz3R6T7Z

— The Access Project (@theaccessp) October 26, 2016

The inspiration just keeps coming from @nesta_uk event: business cards from just a few of the generous #pplhelpingppl Thank you @People4Art pic.twitter.com/rbqDjkoSYk

— Nick Corston (@nickcorston) October 25, 2016

Bravo @HelenGou @vsellick growing the world's confidence to see social action as a key catalyst & driver of great outcomes #pplhelpingppl

— Ruth Kennedy (@ruthkennedy) October 25, 2016
Cities of Service UK
Report
25.10.16

Cities of Service UK

The Power of Peer Support report cover
Report
25.10.16

The power of peer support

What does it take to go big? Insights on scaling social innovation report cover
Report
25.10.16

What does it take to go big? Insights on scaling social innovation

People Helping People: Lessons Learnt report cover
Report
25.10.16

People helping people: lessons learnt

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Nesta is a registered charity in England and Wales 1144091 and Scotland SC042833. Our main address is 58 Victoria Embankment, London, EC4Y 0DS. You can reach us by phone on 020 7438 2500 or drop us a line at [email protected].

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