Co-designing our new Community Finance Resilience Fund

We were recently allocated further funding from the Dormant Assets Scheme, including additional funds to preserve and increase the availability of affordable credit

We know that community finance lenders and their borrowers continue to face huge challenges from the cost of living crisis. To help meet these challenges, support both resilience and sustainability, and deploy funds effectively, we’re establishing a new Community Finance Resilience Fund.

We’re pleased to announce that New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) will be leading our consultation on the co-design of the fund. This will include refining its purpose, eligibility criteria and a proportionate evaluation methodology.

We’re currently setting up meetings with representative bodies and key stakeholders including those in the regulatory space, and we want to ensure that all social purpose providers of affordable finance have the chance to feed into the consultation individually too.

Our aim is to make sure that:

• The purpose of the fund meets what’s needed to sustainably preserve affordable credit provision for people in financially vulnerable circumstances
• The fund is designed with clear and fair eligibility criteria to ensure suitable applications are received and time is not spent on applications that will be unsuccessful
• An evaluation framework is designed that ensures reporting and monitoring by community finance lenders is proportionate to the funding they receive

Please complete the survey by Wednesday 26 July if you’d like to feed into the design of this work.

Please note, because of how the Dormant Asset Scheme is regulated, we are limited to only being able to fund Credit Unions and Community Finance Providers in England.