SCF - Celebrating 20 years

Suffolk Sports
Fund

Our themed funds provide the opportunity for you to give to a subject that you are passionate about. They also provide a platform that brings smaller individual gifts together to make a really big impact.

We worked with The Boroughs, Districts and Suffolk County Council to create the Suffolk Sports Fund – an endowment fund that would secure sustainable long term funding for sports projects in Suffolk.

The public sector funders jointly gave £70,000, and asked the Foundation to find match funders to meet their donation and aspirations for the future.

The Suffolk Sports Fund endowment is now worth over £310,000. Since its inception in 2016, the fund has awarded 96 grants totalling £166,686 and helping over 15000 beneficiaries.

Every penny we raise together for The Suffolk Sports Fund will be used to support the work of charities and community groups in Suffolk – there are some 5,000 of them in total supported by over 60,000 local volunteers.

Over half of our voluntary groups are entirely volunteer led and run at a local grassroots level. They provide essential support to individuals and communities and operate on tiny budgets of considerably less than £10,000 a year. Their inability to compete for funding with larger charities means that over 78% of the money we give each year reaches only the top 3% of charities; this means that a similar amount of our giving here in Suffolk leaves our county never to return.

Our voluntary sector in Suffolk is empowered by local giving and they badly need us to do more to help them. It would be no exaggeration to say that Suffolk would come to a standstill without them.

Want to help the Suffolk Sports Fund? You can donate here. 

These are some groups that have been funded by The Suffolk Sports Fund’s grants panel:

  • Catch22 Suffolk Positive Futures
  • Making Fitness Accessible CIC
  • Mildenhall Town Youth Football Club
  • Sudbury Canoe Club
  • ActivLives
  • Headway Suffolk
  • Murrayside Community Development CIC
  • River Church Ipswich
  • Friends of Sudbury Sporting Memories
  • Riding for the Disabled (Woodbridge & District Group)