Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) has opened the 2019 round of its £220,000 Resilient Communities Fund across central southern England, with up to £20,000 available to charities and local groups looking to undertake a resilience project to help protect their communities in the event of an emergency.
The opening of this most recent round of funding worth £220,000 follows the distribution of over £1.2million to more than 200 community resilience projects in central southern of England in the last 4 years, with 26 local communities receiving a share of nearly £200,000 from the 2018 round of awards.
SSEN’s Resilient Communities Fund supports local projects that:
• Protect the welfare of vulnerable community members through enhancing their resilience and improving community participation and effectiveness
• Enhance community facilities, services and communication – particularly to support local response to a significant emergency event.
Stuart Hogarth, Distribution Operations Director for SSEN in central southern England, said:
“Being a responsible member of the local communities where we distribute electricity is really important to us, and that is why we are so keen to encourage as many people as possible to apply for funding.
“We are committed to supporting our local communities all year round, particularly during power cuts and extreme weather events, but we also want to help customers living in our cities, towns and villages build their own local resilience too.”
Gareth Shields, Community Investment Manager for SSEN, added:
“Our previous funding rounds have shown a diverse range of successful applicants and we’d really like to encourage communities who may not have not applied before to come forward with their resilience projects.
“Previous rounds of the fund were significantly oversubscribed, with applications for physical equipment most popular across our regions.
“To make the most of this funding round, we are encouraging applications that will directly impact vulnerable customers and make a real difference to local communities by helping them build their overall resilience.”
Set up in 2014 as a 2-year pilot scheme, SSEN has pledged to extend the fund to 2023 using a proportion of the income it receives from the industry regulator Ofgem in relation to its stakeholder engagement performance.
In addition to the Resilient Communities Fund, SSEN has been working closely with local communities in the south east of England, helping them create resilience plans for emergencies, such as adverse weather and possible power disruption during winter storms.
Guidelines and applications forms are available on SSEN’s website at www.ssen.co.uk/RCF/England/ with a full report on the fund available here – https://www.ssen.co.uk/RCF/.
The 2019 fund is particularly focused on projects helping vulnerable or isolated people living in SSEN’s network areas, with applications of up to £20,000 to be considered by an independent fund panel.
The closing date for applications is 17th May 2019, with decisions on awards to be made by September 2019.
