Seven UK change-maker charities selected for Scale Accelerator 2019

Spring Impact expands its pioneering programme with £1.5m National Lottery funding

Seven of the UK’s breakthrough charities and social enterprises have been selected to take part in our 2019 Scale Accelerator. The Scale Accelerator programme helps mission-driven organisations gain vital support, skills and perspective to scale up their impact and change more lives.

The announcement comes as Spring Impact expands the Scale Accelerator, thanks to £1.5 million in additional National Lottery Funding. The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK, has backed Scale Accelerator since it launched in 2015 and has recently committed to a further three and a half years of funding, due to the success of the programme.

Following a competitive selection process, this year’s Scale Accelerator cohort includes seven charities from across the UK, all at the frontline of addressing key societal issues – from mental health and loneliness, through to children’s health and development. The 2019 cohort includes:

  • Birth and Beyond Community Supporters (BBCS) – a programme supporting new and expectant mums facing challenges and social isolation run by National Childbirth Trust (NCT)
  • CoachBright – a national social mobility organisation working in schools and universities to help disadvantaged young people improve their grades, confidence and independence
  • Core Arts – a leading mental health creative education centre in London
  • Evolve – a social enterprise that is pioneering ways to improve children’s life outcomes
  • EQUIP  – a team enabling quality improvement for under-pressure GPs in Tower Hamlets
  • Franklin Scholars– an in-school literacy and numeracy peer mentoring programme across England that develops social and emotional skills and habits
  • Tide – a social movement to further the rights and voices of carers of people with dementia. It works to give carers a voice and the tools they need to transform society.

Joe Kallarackal, Spring Impact Director said: “There are so many fantastic mission-driven organisations up and down the country with the ideas, ambition and heart to change people’s lives. Yet the UK’s social sector still finds it challenging to scale impact, meaning great social innovations don’t reach as many people as they should. Spring Impact was founded to fix this. We are excited to be welcoming these trailblazing charities and social enterprises onto the Scale Accelerator to take their social innovations further and change more lives.”

 Since 2015, seventeen ambitious charities and social entrepreneurs from across the country have participated in the Scale Accelerator. The programme has helped organisations tackling the UK’s toughest social problems – including homelessness, food poverty and domestic violence – to increase their reach and impact, and to gain funding for their next phase of growth.

Baillie Aaron, Founder and CEO of Spark Inside, a charity bringing coaching into prisons, which took part in the 2017 programme, said: “Scale Accelerator was a transformational experience for Spark Inside, made possible by the professionalism of their consultants. The programme helped us identify a strategy to scale our delivery and impact nationally (and one day, internationally) – and highlighted the infrastructure we needed to put into place first. The programme galvanised us to move forward faster. I’d like to congratulate the new Scale Accelerator cohort on starting this exciting and invaluable journey toward scaling their impact.”

This year’s Scale Accelerator participants will benefit from an intensive programme of support, using Spring Impact’s clear, but flexible five-stage replication process, to help them gain the strategic skills to overcome hurdles and transform their ambitious vision into a clear plan of action.

As an organisation with a mission to transform how the social sector scales impact in the UK, Scale Accelerator is an example of Spring Impact’s work to engage innovative funders in supporting organisations to scale effectively and sustainably.

Joe Ferns, UK Director at the National Lottery Community Fund, said: “We are delighted that National Lottery funding is continuing to support the Scale Accelerator, which helps organisations to grow and increase their impact. Thanks to the money raised by National Lottery players, ambitious projects across the UK will be able to scale up their effects, enabling more people and communities to thrive.”

 

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