THE foundation that has been hailed as the “missing link” in the battle for independence is set to begin dishing out funds to grassroots campaigners, just a fortnight after The National revealed that it had started with £120,000 in the bank.

The Scottish Independence Foundation (SIF) will offer financial support to groups and individuals and its chief executive, Greg McCarra, is delighted that applications for funds are already coming in along with more and more donations.

The SIF is the brainchild of Willie Wilson, the former convener of the NHS for Yes campaign. The Proclaimers helped launch SIF with a specially recorded video and are continuing to support it.

McCarra said: “It’s only really been a week since we started and we are already getting a steady stream of income from the monthly donations that have been set up.

“We have also had a large number of one-off donations, including several of £100, and with the monthly donations in particular we already know that we could fund a good range of projects on the basis of that income – and that’s after just a week.”

McCarra is a former SNP councillor in West Lothian and was a lecturer at Napier University. He was chairman of the association of nationalist councillors and is currently the convener of the SNP trade union group, having been president of the Educational Institute of Scotland university lecturers grouping.

He already knows there is a demand for financial assistance. “I am pleased to say that we have already had 12 fully worked out applications and these have already been discussed at our board meetings, which are held weekly. I am in the process of writing back to the applicants. We have had applications for sums from £1000 up to £30,000, and while not all of them will be fundable, they will all be given serious consideration.

“I am already using two descriptions of the type of funding that is being sought – pump priming and echo chamber.

“We don’t want to be relied on to fund projects month after month, but we will look at giving a pump priming start to get them going and hopefully they will be self-sufficient after that.

“The echo chamber part is this – we are not interested in funding a group of committed Yessers who want to sit around talking to themselves. It has to be something which is going to reach out there and help convert people to the cause of independence. If it doesn’t do that it will be very hard to persuade us to fund a project.”

Those wishing to apply for funding should do so via the SIF website, www.sif.scot, where there are guidelines and instructions about who can apply and how.

McCarra explained: “We have spelled out a set of criteria and the basic ones are that if someone has a project that is going to do some training or education then we can look at funding it.

“Good examples of this approach is Lesley Riddoch’s Nation films and Business for Scotland’s ambassador training programme, which we have funded.

“That programme is about converting people to independence and not lambasting them for voting No last time. That’s exactly what we want.”