We are excited to announce our 2022 Innovation Fund is now open for applications and will remain open until 18th of September 2022. The fund’s focus is on supporting new and experimental solutions to marine conservation challenges.
In 2022 the Innovation Fund totals £30,000, which will be allocated as follows:
£10,000 will be awarded to projects developing novel solutions to the problem of plastics that damage the marine environment.
£10,000 will be awarded to Scottish based projects.
The final £10,000 is earmarked for projects across the rest of the UK.
Sea-Changers envisages making between 3 and 15 grant awards from the 2022 Innovation Fund. The absolute maximum that can be applied for is £10,000 for any one project.
The Innovation Fund is supported by Liga and the William Grant Foundation with a further donation from a family trust.
A family run business, LIGA have supported Sea-Changers since 2021 by committing to donate 1% of sales from their online store. This additional generous donation of £10,000 aims to promote innovation around the problem of ocean plastic – an issue Liga care deeply about. LIGA make beautiful things out of sustainable materials. Those beautiful things are affordable, innovative and inspired by the natural world they are committed to protect.
The William Grant Foundation is supporting Scottish based innovation projects with a generous donation of £10,000. The William Grant Foundation is a non-profit association established to support charitable causes in Scotland. Its work is funded by William Grant and Sons Ltd.
Helen Webb, Co-Founder of Sea-Changers said: “We are thrilled to be running the Innovation Fund for a second year. We know there are a wide range of individuals and organisations developing innovative solutions to the marine crisis, but they may need help putting their ideas into action. With the support of our funding partners we are now in a fantastic position to implement some real innovation in this area. We are all so excited to see what applicants come up with.”
Full details on how to apply and the funding criteria can be found here.
The Innovation Fund applications will be judged against the following criteria:
Degree of innovation and creativity
Potential for impact on coastal and marine environments and / or species.
Value for money
Deliverability and scalability
In 2021 a single Innovation Fund award of £2,000 was made to Dorset Wildlife Trust. Their project used specialised software, stitching together hundreds of overlapping seabed photographs to create an otherwise impossible to see widescale “aerial” view of the Studland to Portland Special Area of Conservation (SAC), in Dorset. The view allows the monitoring of changes in fragile reef species within this area. The Innovation Award also prompted two other grant awards funding a ‘blue carbon’ audit in Orkney run by Heriot Watt University and, the trial of the use of hydrophones attached to drifting buoys to monitor the presence of dolphins and porpoises and to record underwater soundscapes associated with different habitats run by Dorset Wildlife Trust.
