Sedel - Collings Foundation

The Sedel-Collings Foundation, established in 2006, drives philanthropic empowerment of vulnerable communities through targeted funding that sustains vital services and fosters lasting social resilience. Guided by values of generosity, community empowerment, and long-term impact, it champions holistic approaches blending direct interventions with infrastructural support, believing enduring change arises from strengthening local partnerships, building organizational capacity, and prioritizing evidence of meaningful resilience among those facing exclusion, trauma, or isolation.

It prioritizes care leavers aged 16-25 transitioning to independence via housing support, life skills training, and mentoring; violence against women through trauma-informed counselling, advocacy, and survivor recovery programs; organizational resilience with grants for volunteer wellbeing, safeguarding training, and staff support to sustain frontline services; youth and men's mental health encompassing suicide prevention strategies, peer support groups, therapeutic activities, and mental health counselling; alleviation of loneliness via befriending schemes and community connection initiatives; and bereavement support offering grief counselling and peer networks. Additional focuses include poverty relief through food insecurity aid and financial hardship support, health advancement via preventative wellbeing programs, education enhancement with youth skills development, and community cohesion projects promoting social inclusion. Interventions emphasize person-centred, community-led models like outreach, drop-in centres, early intervention for mental ill health, and capacity-building for voluntary organizations delivering direct services to isolated individuals, young people at risk, and families in crisis.

Exclusions encompass capital expenditure, consultancy, research, grant-making activities, and salary funding, prioritizing project-based, core cost, and resilience-focused grants instead. Distinctive for "supporting the supporters" ethos, it favors constituted community groups and charities demonstrating systemic capacity-building, volunteer safeguarding, and direct benefits for care-experienced youth, domestic abuse survivors, men facing suicide risk or loneliness, and bereaved island or rural coastal communities, valuing trauma-informed, preventative approaches rooted in local knowledge and social connection.