Aviva Foundation
About the Aviva Foundation
The Aviva Foundation was originally set up to increase financial capability and inclusion, strengthen community resilience, and drive climate action.
Recognising the growing need to build more secure financial futures for people and communities, our focus has evolved. Since 2023, the Foundation’s funding priorities focus on helping people become more financially secure.
The Foundation is independent of Aviva. The funds we use come from unclaimed assets on Aviva’s shareholder registry. These are shares and dividends where no owner can be found, money that would otherwise sit idle. Instead, the Foundation uses that money, along with other donations, for public benefit.
The Aviva Foundation is administered by Charities Trust under charity registration number 327489.
Helping people become more financially secure
The Aviva Foundation aims to help people and communities feel in control and positive about their financial futures.
Millions in the UK are struggling and worried about money. The cost-of-living crisis has only added to the stress for those already living on an economic knife-edge.
The Foundation funds organisations working on new ways to help people prevent and prepare for financial challenges, or deal with and recover from financial setbacks.
Our ambition is to tackle difficult problems in new ways. We give organisations the support and stability they need so they can use their expertise to innovate and transform the lives of those who need it the most.
Our impact:
The difference we’re making… our impact across 2023
Across 2023, over 2,000 people directly benefited from programmes supported by the Foundation. Our 2023 impact report highlights how the Foundation supported our partners to build the financial resilience of those who need it the most in the UK.
Our impact… a summary of the organisations we are currently supporting
Browse through summaries of a selection of the organisations the Aviva Foundation is currently supporting.
How we’ve helped
The Aviva Foundation funded a consortium formed of Talking Money, St. Paul’s Advice Centre and Advice UK. The money, along with expertise from Aviva colleagues, has helped them to rethink how they provide advice to people experiencing financial pressures in Bristol.
Our funding has helped them to test, develop and scale up new ways of improving the financial well-being of low-income communities.
Transcript for video Aviva - Talking Money - Case study
Talking Money is a charity based in Bristol. Essentially we exist to relieve poverty, to combat financial exclusion and to promote access to justice for people experiencing financial problems.
So the Aviva Foundation has provided funding for us to work in partnership with another local advice agency St. Paul's Advice Centre and Advice UK, national membership body for advice centres.
And they have supported us over the last few years to put direct resource to working with clients in a different way.
So it's starting to look at root cause, starting to look at systemic issues, taking the time to think about the work we're doing with people and produce the work with people.
So one of the biggest challenges for us now is that we are seeing people, for example, who are employed, but whose wages don't even cover their basic day to day living costs.
So we're seeing people with rent arrears, council tax arrears, gas and electric water debts, but with no real obvious solution in sight.
So the impact that we are having as a result of the funding, it's helping us to work with clients for longer, so that we don't just solve their immediate crisis.
We help them to find the solution and stick with them after that crisis is gone, so that they're not back to us with another crisis in a year's time.
We're dealing with the most marginalised in society and those people can be stuck in poverty for significant chunks of their life and without kind of the interventions that we can do at potentially an earlier stage, before people get into real financial hardship.
How we work
The Foundation funds charitable, non-profit and social enterprises that aim to improve people’s financial resilience - their ability to cope with money problems.
Since its creation in 2018, we have committed over £10 million in funding to help people and communities. Based on our heritage, expertise and the level of need, the Foundation’s current funding priorities are to build understanding and explore alternative solutions that:
- Build financial inclusion – tackling inequality and discrimination to increase fair access to essential financial products and services, such as savings, protection and pensions, building resilience throughout the life course.
- Strengthen financial wellbeing– building people’s capability and confidence in managing their finances - now and in the future.
- Support strategic initiatives to help individuals and communities to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from financial challenges.
We seek to provide partners with support and security so they can experiment, innovate and try something new to challenge the status quo. This can include:
- Creating and testing new, creative ways to tackle an entrenched or emerging issue relating to our funding priorities
- Investing in approaches which will generate insights for others, with the potential to be replicable and to scale, influencing the way issues are seen and tackled in society
- Forging new coalitions or alliances of diverse partners to address a problem in a different way
- Developing a response that includes a community that have been previously excluded or underrepresented
Get in touch
Funding guidelines
If you are interested in learning more about the Aviva Foundation, the areas we fund and organisations we support, please read our funding guidelines.
These funding guidelines provide an overview of what we fund, how we fund, who we fund and why. They are intended to support organisations to decide whether to apply to the Foundation.
Contact us
After reviewing the funding guidelines (PDF 515KB) and our eligibility criteria, please contact: avivafoundation@aviva.com if you are interested in applying to the Foundation.
We run two open application processes each year. The application deadlines for 2024 are: round one, 17/04/2024 and round two, 23/10/2024.