PowerPartners, the ScottishPower charity initiative, has awarded the first batch of grants to its five partner charities. £30,300 has been awarded to support various projects across Scotland, split between the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), Age Concern Scotland, Disability Scotland and NCH Action for Children.

PowerPartners is a three year initiative with a fundraising target of £3 million. The key objectives of the partnership are to raise income to fund social investment projects in Scotland, raise awareness of special needs in the community, work with the partner charities to develop services to customers with special needs and encourage staff participation in charitable causes.

The projects chosen for this first batch of awards are £10,000 for a Scotland wide "Information Surgery" developed by Disability Scotland. The aim of the project is to develop the links between Health & Social Care and provide health related information for disabled people and others affected by disability across Scotland. It will address these issues by piloting methods for disseminating information via health networks and researching the experiences of marginalised groups.

£10,000 has been awarded to NCH Action for Children for its Family Group Conference pilot project, which will be based in Glasgow. It will provide a service to parents and families to prevent children being caught up in the care system. The project will benefit children in need of care or protection and parents who suffer from a sense of powerlessness in coping with child care and family issues.

Age Concern Scotland has been awarded £10,000 for its "Enterprise Fund" which was set up to provide small grants to local groups whose work benefits older people living in the greater Glasgow and Edinburgh areas. Past projects that have benefited from the grants include a day centre in Dumfriesshire who used their grant to buy new furniture and another centre in Livingston who started a resource library. The majority of the grants are between £200 to £500.

RNIB's Centre for Visually Impaired in Partick has also received £3,300 which will allow the charity to purchase new CD production equipment. This will enable the centre to now transcribe a wide range of literature onto CDs which gives better reproduction standards, faster transcription of text through IT links and enable visually impaired people to download and manipulate large files. The service will be available for all visually impaired people in Scotland.

The money has been raised through staff fundraising and company donations. The charities then put forward projects for selection for funding, which were then reviewed and approved by the Board of Trustees. The next batch of grants will be awarded in March.

The most recent staff fundraising event was a group-wide prize draw, the "Thrillennium", which had a top prize of a Toyota Celica sports car, followed by a weekend for two in New York. The Thrillennium raised £10,000 which has been matched funded by ScottishPower.