Mayor’s Resilience Fund

The Mayor’s Resilience Fund will support the designing and testing of new innovations with grants of up to £30,000. The grants would enable:

• The creation of tools to help London’s economy emerge from the current crisis and to fare better during future stresses and shocks. In addition, the grants would support London’s community of small businesses and community organisations in adapting, diversifying and delivering services in new ways, while boosting their levels of preparedness, awareness, skills and capacity.
• Positive social change that addresses London’s major stresses – from inequality and food insecurity to poor health and well-being.

Who can apply?

The first stage is to make sure we’re addressing the most important problems facing London and finding the right partners for the fund – what we call our ‘resilience partners’.

For example, if you’re a business group that has concerns about Brexit, a charity that is helping tackle food insecurity, a borough seeking ways to improve street and infrastructure resilience or a social enterprise that is helping make London a fairer, more equal city – you are exactly the type of organisation we’re looking for.

Businesses, social enterprises and community groups will then be matched with innovative SMEs that will help them find new ways of delivering their products and services to keep up with the accelerated pace of change after the pandemic and to improve their own resilience in the face of future shocks.

We want to fund a range of projects that will help London’s small businesses and civic society emerge from the current crisis stronger and more resilient.

This list is not exhaustive, and projects may deliver on one or more of the following actions, but they could help to:

• Boost supply chain resilience
• Build businesses operational resilience
• Tackle inequality
• Address food insecurity
• Improve health and well-being
• Improve air quality and tackle climate change

Examples of innovations that could receive support from the fund range from new forms of data capture and digital infrastructure (for example to support the operational resilience of businesses) to ways of using data and technology to identify and address vulnerabilities in supply chains, local food or energy production.

The Mayor’s Resilience Fund is supported by the Mayor of London and is part of the London Business Hub business offer. The programme is funded by the London Economic Action Partnership (LEAP).