Funding to deliver housing models supporting those in the migration, asylum and trafficking systems

Home Partner With Us Call for New Ideas

Call for New Ideas: Migration, Asylum and Human Trafficking is now closed.

The deadline for Call for New Ideas has now passed. Thank you to everyone who applied and got in touch.

Applications will now be reviewed by a Selection Panel made up of sector experts, Commonweal staff and Trustees.

We aim to inform applicants of their outcomes in December, and are happy to provide feedback to applications that are unsuccessful upon request.

If you have not heard from us about your application by 3rd January, please email apply@commonweal.org.uk.

What is Call for New Ideas?

The Call for New Ideas is our invitation to not-for-profits across the UK to come to us with new and imaginative ideas for housing and support models that seek to address a specific social injustice.

We offer successful applicants between £5,000-£10,000 in grant funding to conduct a feasibility study to further evaluate the viability of your model.

The aim is to work in partnership with you to bring your models to life. It starts with your lightbulb idea, and it finishes, we hope, with a housing and support pilot project running over 5-10 years.

We would support partners throughout the project development stage until the end of its life cycle, including collecting and sharing project learnings to inform best practice and influence policy across the sector.

What do successful applicants have to say?

Since launching Call for New Ideas in 2020, Commonweal has successfully supported a number of partners through the feasibility stage, with many now entering the project development process.

"The team at Commonweal were fantastic and supported us all the way through the process, providing expert advice, guidance and signposting when needed...

If anyone has an idea to tackle a social injustice and needs support to develop, I strongly suggest that you consider the Call for New Ideas."

- Gaynor Brooke, Head of Services at successful 2022 Call for New Ideas applicant Servol Community Services. Read Servol’s story here

“When we heard about Commonweal Housing’s Call for New Ideas, inviting organisations to apply for funding to test the viability of new housing models, it was enviably an opportunity we felt we have worked towards. Now was the perfect moment to put our work at the forefront of the challenges we know our girls are facing within the criminal justice system”

– Aliyah Ali, CEO at The Daddyless Daughters Project - successful applicant of Call for New Ideas 2023: Criminal Justice. Full blog here