Ms Frances Haworth:

I can give the committee a sense of the grant-making involved and the kind of impact we hope the projects will have. We opened the fund to applicants in April and received approximately 100 applications, involving requests amounting to €1.3 million. We were oversubscribed by a ratio of 3:1 in respect of the funding we had available. We deliberately kept the criteria quite broad in order to enable groups to tell us about the issues on the ground they wanted to work on. The idea behind the grants is that there is a grant behind each. In other words, a non-profit organisation in the South and another in the North will partner on a key issue. There are different stages to that. They can be early-stage partnerships. In other words, if the two groups had just started and identified that they wanted to work together, they might be exploring ideas initially. Then we had stage-4 organisations that had already developed partnerships and could apply for more funding to further develop those partnerships and, maybe, develop shared policy positions.

We had strong interest in the fund, which was oversubscribed. Our assessment panel went through all the grants and selected 30 strong partnerships. We were delighted with the quality of what came forward. It was interesting to see the themes that were coming through. Because we had quite broad criteria in terms of encouraging groups to come forward with issues they felt it would be important for them to work on together, we saw different themes emerging. There was a strong interest, for example, in cross-Border environmental work. We have funded six projects for organisations looking at clean air quality and how to work together on the common issue we have around climate change, including, for example, in the context of community recycling initiatives.

There are some really interesting projects. We also had a focus on migrants and racial justice, funding a number of projects in the area and looking at shared learnings around integration of migrants in the education system, for example, and supporting leaders from the migrant community. That is some really interesting work.

There were also some joint policy projects and Ms Kelly will speak in more detail around a project working with the Children's Rights Alliance. There is some really interesting work exploring more rights-based issues where, for example, we support TASC with a grant to do some workshops looking at how the most disadvantaged have been affected by Brexit. It is a really interesting range of projects, with some health matters coming forward as well.

From our perspective it has been really interesting to listen to the communities and the sector about what it wants to put forward and work on. We are looking to support that with flexible funding to enable those discussions and some joint work as well.