The Coast to Capital Backing Business Grants is a £2 million fund that has been set up to provide grants to independent small businesses and social enterprises (excluding charities) in our area who have been affected by COVID-19.
Applications now open.
We anticipate that this fund will be able to help up to 400 organisations in the Coast to Capital area. Applications are open until the fund has been fully allocated. There are a number of other initiatives available through HM Government therefore, applicants are encouraged to make use of these where available to help their businesses.
If you are an independent small business or social enterprise (excluding charities) based in West Sussex, Brighton & Hove, or East Surrey (Epsom and Ewell, Mole Valley, Reigate and Banstead, Tandridge) with 5-50 FTE (full time equivalent) workforce who has been trading for over 2 years and have an annual turnover of under £10m, you can apply for a grant of £5,000-£25,000 to fund specific measures to help you to adapt, evolve and innovate to the various economic impacts brought about by the pandemic.
Applicants must use the grant to implement one or more of the following measures:
- Adapt their operations to remote working. This might include acquisition of computer hardware or software or other physical measures to support the separation of staff and deliver sustained operations;
- Evolve their business model to boost and retain cash-flow. This might include firms which are no longer able to sell directly to customers and need to add new delivery or marketing functions;
- Innovate their business model to meet the new demands of consumers during the COVID-19 scenario.
The grant is available for all sectors, however we will be particularly interested to receive applications from businesses working in the sectors in which our economy has been particularly impacted by recent economic events (i.e. aviation and aviation supply chain, tourism, hospitality and leisure and the service economy).
Applicants will be required to submit the latest filed company accounts and latest management accounts along with the application form for the business.
The grants can be used for capital or revenue costs, or a mixture of both – there are no restrictions on the ratio of capital and revenue. The grant will be made in a one-off advance payment and will need to be evidence after spend has taken place.
The grant funding can be used to procure any professional assistance in order to introduce measures to adapt, evolve and innovate in their proposals. The Coast to Capital Growth Hub Team will be actively involved with the business during and post grant award to offer any business support requirements.
The grants cannot be used to pay for salaries or staffing costs.
The grant awarded does not have to be matched funded and can be for 100% of the cost of the investment or used with the businesses own funds to deliver the proposed outcome(s).
The grants will be made available on a first-come-first-served basis.
Coast to Capital’s decision on all grants will be final, there is no appeals process outside of the normal complaints policy which can be found on the Coast to Capital website.
Coast to Capital reserve the right to change the grant criteria and/or process at any time.
How to apply
The funding criteria can be viewed in the related resources box to the right.
- Download and complete the eligibility checker, which can be found in the related resources box (to the right), and send to funding@coast2capital.org.uk
- Once your eligibility has been verified by a member of the team, we will email you an application form to complete
- If you are unable to successfully complete our eligibility checker, please contact our Growth Hub team for business support
- Additional support relating to COVID-19 can be found on our Growth Hub website