Big Society Capital has invested £1m in an organisation which funds community organisations to support volunteering with older people.

Developing Empowering Resources in Communities (Deric), a community interest company, will lend money to community organisations that support the elderly.

These organisations will use the funding to increase support to elderly people with social care needs, including providing trained volunteers to help them.

The organisations will be paid through the personal care budgets of their beneficiaries, and this funding will allow them to repay money to Deric.

Deric will then lend this money to other community groups.

Deric will invest the £1m from Big Society Capital in seven different programmes: four in Leeds, one in Sandwell, one in Belfast and one in Medway. But Nick O’Donohoe, chief executive of Big Society Capital, said he hoped that Deric would then recycle the money to help develop other, similar organisations elsewhere in the country.

O’Donohoe said the programme was “a great example of exactly how our money should be used”.

He said that the organisation would act as a specialist lender to a particular type of community organisation, with the intention of growing that organisation to cover the UK.

“These are two guys who are experts in the field who have a real passion for this and just felt there was a better way,” he said. “We would love to support more organisations like this, but the problem is finding the ideas and the individuals with the skills to make it happen.”