The RSA announces the eight latest Catalyst Award winners

London, 31 January – Today, the RSA has announced the eight projects that will receive its Catalyst Award, a grant given to enable social impact projects to flourish.

The seed and scale grants – one to help projects get off the ground and the other to help projects with a proven social impact to grow, are given based on their potential to serve their local communities by impacting skills and employment, education and learning, health and wellbeing, or community participation and decision-making.  

The selected projects do so in a myriad of ways. The seed grant winners are:

EmpowerEd 

An immersive app that provides teachers with continuous training in diversity, equity and inclusion practices through immersive personas, game-based decision-making, immersive common classroom scenarios, as well as reflective and critical thinking challenges, created by a group of social innovators in India.

Primary Pioneers

An innovative new programme designed to help pupils build transferrable skills, agency, and citizenship by encouraging them to use design-thinking to identify and solve issues they care about in their local communities in Sussex.

The Public Haybox

The Public Haybox are going to run a series of workshops creating fuel-less cooking boxes in Walthamstow to tackle food and fuel poverty in the area and open a dialogue within the local community to build the agency local citizens.

Influences

An innovative new boardgame designed for secondary school students to tackle radicalisation and extremism created by local expert in Portsmouth. Through a safe environment of a board game, pupils will go on a journey to make educated decisions in the face of external pressures. This will help pupils to build resilience against radicalisation of all forms, including online risks and violent conspiracy theories.

While the scale grant winners are:

DEBSS+

An early intervention service that will work with 25 disabled adults in Dorset who have experienced redundancy because of the pandemic to gain new skills and improve confidence and wellbeing and help close the disability employment gap in the area.

South London Music Therapy Clinic

A new Music Therapy Clinic in South London, sister clinic to the North London Music Therapy Clinic CIC., that will be opened in response to huge demand for a second centre to serve people of all ages with anxiety, stress and depression in an area where there are currently three-year waiting lists.

Partner Up!

A new platform to showcase Cultural Social Prescribing in London through multiple data points, for example by borough, art form or cost and to bring cultural partners together to collaborate, share best practices and support the creative health sector. By collecting and sharing across the cultural voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors, it hopes to support the ambition of the NHS's integrated care system while reinvigorating the cultural scene in London.

Money Movers

A peer-learning programme carried out across the UK which empowers women to move their personal finances to support climate action. By participating, women grow capabilities, agency and gain access a supportive green finance network. The project has already successfully encouraged 140 women to move £1.2 million towards more sustainable investments and made 100% of participants more confident aligning their money with climate values following the sessions.

Zayn Meghji, Catalyst Fund Manager at the RSA, said “In the face of the many crises our societies are currently experiencing, each of these projects is working to galvanise their local communities and create innovative new solutions within their sector, whether that be education, skills, or healthcare, in a way that we believe will have a tangible impact on people's lives.”

It is a privilege to present these worthy winners with the RSA’s Catalyst Grant funding. We look forward to seeing the impact that these projects have, now and in the future.”