Expressions of interest are now being accepted for proposed projects to help support older people and their unpaid carers in the city.
ACVO TSI, Aberdeen’s third sector interface, and partners have ringfenced £100,000 from the Scottish Government’s Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund, to distribute across projects through a new Community Commissioning funding exercise.
Community commissioning is a process that involves bringing together a range of people from different backgrounds and perspectives, to identify and prioritise the needs of the community, and set priorities on how to allocate resources to meet those needs.
In this particular exercise, older people and their unpaid carers were previously invited to join in with discussions about what they believe would have a significant positive impact across the city.
From these discussions, a lived experience panel has outlined 3 areas of interest to focus the £100,000 fund on: getting information out to the people who need it, activities for older people and their unpaid carers, and meeting minibus and transport needs.
From today, ACVO TSI encourages third sector organisations across Aberdeen city to submit their expression of interest if they have the capacity to help target and support these 3 areas.
Organisations submitting an expression of interest are informed they must be open to the possibility of working in partnership with other third sector organisations to deliver the projects in full.
This is to ensure that smaller organisations can be included in this community commissioning exercise, allowing the reach of the projects to still be large and ensuring the support for older people and their unpaid carers to be as valuable as possible.
Once the window of accepting expressions of interest has closed on Tuesday 14th February, a networking event will be scheduled. The intended outcome for this event is that partnerships for each project will be formed through open and cooperative group discussions, facilitated by ACVO TSI staff.
Following the formation of partnerships, each group will create their draft project proposal. These will then be passed on to and assessed by the lived experience panel.
Finally, the lived experience panel will meet to discuss the project proposals, with decisions expected to be made around mid-March where funds will then be released to successful organisations.
Further details of Community Commissioning, as well as a short form to register expression of interest, can be found at https://acvo.org.uk/community-com
More information about the Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund, and how Aberdeen has utilised this fund so far, can be found at https://acvo.org.uk/funding/cmhw/
