About the Families First for Children Pathfinder Grants

We know that our Voluntary and Community Sector partners are well placed to support the programme with its ambitions not least in ensuring that families get local, preventative, community led support in the right place and at right time. 

We want to tap into the sector’s expertise to improve outcomes, generate innovation and develop best practice approaches. Our aim is to demonstrate approaches that work through test and learn partnerships.

There are four grant projects. Please ensure you read the information carefully prior to applying.

Three of the projects require delivery across the Dorset Council area. The fourth is focused on localised community and parent led support; for this project we welcome applications from those who work in a specific community. 

Organisations may apply for one grant or multiple, provided they meet the criteria for each.

Available funding

£260,000 of non-recurrent funding is being made available, under the Families First for Children Pathfinder, for the purposes of this grant fund. The funding shall cover the period from grant award in September 2024 through to March 2026. 

The maximum individual grants that will be made available to cover the whole of this period are:

• £50,000 for Family Network Meeting facilitation
• £70,000 for Parental mental health peer support
• £70,000 for Parent-infant relationship support
• £10,000 for Community and parent led support

Application evaluation process

The grant evaluation panel membership will consist of parent/carer representative, Dorset VCSA, Dorset Council Children’s Services, NHS Dorset, and Public Health Dorset.

The panel will initially screen the applications to ensure fairness. Where a conflict of interest occurs the panel member will not take part in the assessment and the conflict of interest will be recorded.

The panel will assess each application against the project evaluation criteria (listed in each grant project information section) using the scoring matrix (provided below for information purposes only) to evaluate and prioritise awards.

Scoring is:

• 5 - exceeds the requirement
• 3 - meets the requirement
• 1 - partially meets the requirement
• 0 - fails to meet the requirement

Decisions will be made by combined scoring. The panel decision is final and there is no appeal.

If an organisation withdraws their application after the panel decision has been made, the panel members can agree to award the grant to another organisation.

Any decision to amend the award if an organisation has changed, or new information comes to light that affects the application, will be considered by the panel members as appropriate.

Key dates

Round 1 

• applications opened 31 July 2024
• applications closed 11:59pm Sunday 8 September 2024
• grant evaluation 9 to 17 September 2024
• funding decisions communicated on or before 18 September 2024

Round 2

A further round of applications will be taken for the community and parent led support grants only.

• applications close 11:59pm Sunday 6 October 2024
• grant evaluation 7 to 15 October 2024
• funding decisions communicated on or before 16 October 2024