The Innovation Fund is available for adult learning providers in Wales who wish to deliver online and in-person learning activity for Adult Learners’ Week.

Adult Learners’ Week is an annual campaign which celebrates and promotes learning opportunities for everyone.

The campaign will run from 18^th – 24^th September 2023, with promotional activity taking place throughout the month.

The campaign provides a focus to promote formal and informal opportunities and to celebrate lifelong learning. We want to showcase steps back into learning and opportunities to develop skills for work, life, health, and community connections.

We want to work with you to deliver a programme of festival events for people across Wales. We’ll promote community events, short courses, taster sessions, online provision, advice, and information. We want to work with you to signpost more people to learning opportunities and to support them to get advice and information.

This fund offers support for providers of adult learning to deliver outreach, promotional activity or online tasters for the campaign week and throughout the month of September 2023.

Grants of up to £750 are available to organisations working in Wales who deliver lifelong learning. This grant fund is intended to support the creation of free bitesize tasters, learning events, outreach activity, masterclasses, learner voice activities, and to develop content that can be adapted to an online environment. You may also be interested in delivering online/face to face open days – these should be focused on learning for adults. We are also interested in family learning activities to support individuals or communities.

We are interested in activity that:

• Tackles barriers to participation and to promote equality and inclusion
• Focuses on people with low levels of skills or qualifications
• Creates partnerships with health care to tackle health inequalities and to recognise the role of learning and skills as an important part of the solution to a healthy life
• Builds on the enthusiasm of existing learners as advocates who use their voice and connections as a platform encourage their own communities to take part
• Builds a positive culture of learning, motivating as many adults as possible to see the value and the benefits of taking part and progress onto further learning

Closing date:
For this year’s Innovation Fund, there will be a rolling deadline up until the end of August, please submit your application as soon as you’re able to, we recommend you submit your proposal by Monday 10th July if possible to allow yourself enough time to plan your programme of activity. Please send your completed application to: alwevents@learningandwork.org.uk.