This fund will provide up to £80,000 per grant towards local projects that test and evaluate new approaches which target at least one of the three drivers of child poverty reduction: improving income from employment, supporting people with the cost of living, and increasing awareness and uptake of social security benefits.
The Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund (CPAF) was launched in July 2023 and awarded grants to 9 projects across Scotland in its first round. Now entering its second round, the fund’s continued aim is to provide support to enhance an area’s approach to tackling child poverty. It will support small scale projects to generate evidence on a known problem, adapt a promising approach from elsewhere to work in your area, or re-design a service or services to deliver greater impact on child poverty.
As with CPAF Round 1, proposed activity could cover testing a new approach, evaluating a promising approach, adapting an effective pilot to be delivered at scale, or testing an effective approach in another setting. Examples of this are outlined under ‘What funding can be used for’.
The lead applicant for CPAF Round 2 must be either a Local Authority or a Health Board. This is to ensure alignment with Local Child Poverty Action Reports (LCPAR) and to ensure any local action is coordinated.
CPAF aims to deliver on the priorities set out below, noting that not all applications/ projects will meet all of these criteria:
Who can receive funding
Whilst the lead applicant must be a Local Authority or Health Board, the lead applicant can nominate another organisation to deliver the project and therefore receive funding.