Resilience Fund

Aims of the Fund

The Resilience Fund forms part of our 2030 Strategy and represents a £900,000 investment in strengthening the voluntary sector. It aims to support small-to-medium sized organisations to invest in organisational development and build resilience for the future. The fund is currently closed to applications. 

Fund Overview

The first year of the Fund was aimed at organisations working in the youth employment sector, supporting them to find time for their own resilience journeys. 

Our second cohort was formed of 10 organisations working with young people from Global Majority communities to improve their mental health. 

Our partners from year three are five organisations working with young people who are experiencing or at risk of homelessness, and who face multiple layers of discrimination and inequality.

For all cohorts, the organisational development grants are offered alongside a wraparound learning programme, facilitated by our learning partner Social Innovation Exchange (SIX). This brings partners together to share experiences and learn from each other. 

You can read more about the Resilience Fund in the funding guidelines for each cohort: 

Our Building Blocks to Resilience

Through the Resilience Fund, we want to support voluntary sector organisations to improve their ability to plan for, cope with, and respond to change – whether through improved governance and people power, better financial planning or stronger systems and strategies. We want to ensure that they will be around to support young people and their communities for many years to come.

There is no one single success formula for organisational resilience but considerable work has been done across the sector to identify the key building blocks. We are supporting projects that meet one or more of these objectives.

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A clear mission, operationalised through strong strategic planning 

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Financial sustainability

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Effective leadership

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Operations that are fit for purpose 

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People and culture that meet your needs

Adding Value Through Learning

We are committed to learning about our work and sharing our learning across the public, private and voluntary sectors. We are working with Social Innovation Exchange to deliver a learning and evaluation programme alongside our funding. The programme focuses on highlighting best practice and supports peer learning.  

We hope that learnings from the Resilience Fund, as well as from other similar initiatives across the sector, will support other funders to consider funding in this way. 

We have recently published an article about our work on resilience in Alliance Magazine. You can read more about our learning to date here.

Our Partners

In its first two years, the Resilience Fund has supported 20 organisations working to help young people to overcome barriers to work and kick-start their careers, and to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people from Black and Minoritised Communities. 

We are currently working with the following organisations over two years to help build their organisational resilience:

Our Impact

"We are delighted to be working in partnership with the Berkeley Foundation at this stage in BelEve's journey.  We value partners who support us in continuing to provide new experiences and opportunities for girls and young women to improve their life chances and career prospects. The fund will contribute to BelEve becoming a sustainable charity delivering greater impact and transformation in girls and young women's lives."

Marsha Powell, Director, BelEve 

"The support of the Berkeley Foundation has allowed us to fund our Youth Coordinator. This newly created role will play an essential part in strengthening our resilience and ensure we can respond to the increasing demands of our young people with skills, time and support. Makeda will help us improve how we recruit, support, track and evaluate the progress of our Young Shoots as they develop their knowledge and experience on our Young Shoots and Short Sharp Shot training programmes."

Natalie Wade, Founder & CEO, Small Green Shoots