Voluntary Sector providers of Adult Social Care who are involved in the personalisation agenda may find the following Grant Scheme useful. Get Connected offers up to £20,000 for suitable organisations to improve access to ICT for users, carers, staff and visitors. Examples provided by SCIE of the sort of projects they would like to fund include:

• Enabling residents to keep in touch with friends and family by using ICT
• Using ICT to enable staff to keep up to date and engage in training
• Enabling service users to keep in touch with each other

Organisations will need to be registered with Companies House or the Charity Commission.

These are the details as we have received them:

We are writing to you with advance warning of the last round of a grants programme, Get Connected, that you or colleagues might be kind enough to publicise. It is the last of four cycles of funding and we are concerned that London services have been under represented in applications in the first cycles. Please pass the note and the link below to any colleagues in touch with adult social care services and encourage them to circulate it. There’s a very informative website about Get Connected. We’ll remind our members again when the cycle actually opens too.

With two grant making cycles completed, the Get Connected Investment Project has already made grants to over 600 adult social care providers in England which will allow providers to improve ICT access for users and staff. The deadline for submission of application forms for Cycle 3 of the project is rapidly approaching and care providers that have been invited to complete a Cycle 3 application are being encouraged to submit their forms as quickly as possible.

Cycle 4 of the project will open for new Expressions of Interest in November and if you or colleagues are in touch with providers of care services for adults in England (residential or domiciliary services), you may want to encourage them to check their eligibility to receive a grant of up to £20,000 to be used to improve ICT access for their users and staff. Private and voluntary sector adult social care providers offering services in England and registered with the Care Quality Commission, Companies House, Financial Services Authority or the Charity Commission are eligible to apply. The level of funding that they can apply for is dependent on the size of their organisation.

For more information click here http://www.scie.org.uk/workforce/getconnected/investmentfund.asp