Three Years of the Activity Support Tier: Eleven Projects, and a Window for Designing Support

Japan's dormant deposits scheme contains a window that distributes no money. It is called the activity support tier. It sits at the second tier and provides supported organizations with help in people and knowledge only. JANPIA's funding stops at the activity support organization; nothing flows beyond it.

Results for this window have been published since FY2023. I counted every entry in three years of adopted lists and not-adopted lists.

Eleven projects were selected in three years. Applications, taken as the sum of the two lists, come to 30, 27 and 20. For FY2025, JANPIA states in its own press release that "20 projects (20 organisations) applied and 4 projects (4 organisations) were selected as activity support organizations", which confirms that this is how the counting works.

The winners are as follows.

Every figure in the table is copied from JANPIA's adopted lists. Adding them gives 542,940,943 yen. The smallest is 24,512,000 yen in FY2023 and the largest 64,623,600 yen in FY2025, so almost all of them sit close to the indicative figure of "around 50 million yen for a three-year programme".

Most of the winners are regional foundations, nonprofit centres or sector networks. Not all of them, though. The Youth Support Center, selected in FY2024, runs Japanese-language teaching and study support for children and young people of foreign roots itself, and so sits on the frontline side. It was selected for a programme supporting other organisations in the same field.

What the eleven share is not their type but the direction of the application. Every one was submitted as a programme that supports other organisations. Conversely, in three years of lists there is not one organisation that applied to this window in order to receive non-financial support. Under the scheme, the door for receiving it is elsewhere.

An applicant picks one of two target categories: [1] support for providers of funding, or [2] support for providers of public-interest activity. The first supports organisations aiming to become, or already acting as, fund distribution organizations. The second supports frontline organisations.

Split by category, three years look like this.

Only three selections in three years went to the category that grows the distributing side, and FY2024 produced none. The window exists in the design; this is how often it has actually moved.

The figures show a gap as well. The FY2024 guidelines state that "the total grant for FY2024 shall be determined with 300 million yen as a guide, depending on the state of applications". Adding the planned grants of the three selected projects gives 153,431,738 yen, roughly half that guide. The components are the 51,500,000, 49,911,820 and 52,019,918 yen shown in the adopted list. Since the guidelines themselves say "depending on the state of applications", coming in below the guide is within what the scheme allows.

Applications ran 30, 27 and 20. JANPIA's published materials give no reason for that movement. How widely the call was publicised, how organisations read the previous year's results, and how well the scheme is known could all bear on it, but none of that can be established from what is published. The counts are recorded here as counts.

Cabinet Office figures, meanwhile, count 15 organizations[1] behind those eleven projects, reaching 50 supported organizations. The gap between 11 and 15 is made up of consortium members, which shows that applying as a joint venture has become established practice.

For FY2025, JANPIA published five main reasons, drawn from assessor comments, why applications were not selected. Translated from the original:

In a programme meant to develop providers of funding, the perspective of building capability to design grant programmes as a fund distribution organization is weak.

The impression is of a plan for training and practice for its own sake, making it hard to picture whether the supported organisations as a whole would genuinely acquire the skills.

There is insufficient presentation of quantified outcomes showing what growth is expected of supported organisations, making the results and effects hard to picture.

Narrowing the profile of target organisations or the field to some degree would allow a programme designed to their growth stage or field, and could produce greater impact.

The design of the programme, including selection criteria for supported organisations and support methods, is not sufficiently worked through.

Four of the five point not at the content of the support but at the design of it. Who the target is, how that organisation changes, and how the change is measured. What is being tested is the stage before training and hands-on support: the programme design.

The same release lists what was valued in the selected projects. A programme designed from a problem awareness grounded in funding experience; intermediary experience built through work on local issues; core staff positioned as a strategic role in rebuilding an organisation. Here too, track record and design appear side by side.

Put together, the character of the window emerges. This is a window for organisations that can design support. It is not an entrance for organisations that want to be supported. Their entrance is the call issued by whichever activity support organizations were selected.

Two consequences follow.

First, for an organisation seeking support, which doors open in a given year is decided by that year's winners. FY2024 produced no selection in the "providers of funding" category, so in that year there was no entrance for an organisation aiming to become a fund distribution organization to receive non-financial support. A window existing in the scheme and a door being open in a given year are different things.

Second, for an intermediary body targeting this window, the decisive ground is programme design rather than its own track record. The published reasons do not cite a lack of experience. They cite the narrowing of the target and the way change is measured. The design of a logic model and outcome indicators is, directly, what separates success from failure here. How to build that design overlaps with the ground covered by Impact Evaluation and Social Innovation（外部サイト、新しいタブで開きます） (Ichiro Tsukamoto and Masao Seki), whose subject is how the results of a social enterprise are measured, which is precisely what the assessors mean by presenting quantified outcomes.

Eleven projects in three years is a small window by count. It nonetheless reaches 50 supported organizations. Measured in money it is easy to overlook, but this is the only route in the scheme through which resources other than money move.

References

FY2025 Activity Support Organization Call Results (adopted list, not-adopted list, press release) — Japan Network for Public Interest Activities (JANPIA) (2025)

FY2024 Activity Support Organization Call: Adopted Organisations and Projects — Japan Network for Public Interest Activities (JANPIA) (2025)

FY2023 Activity Support Organization Call: Adopted Organisations and Projects — Japan Network for Public Interest Activities (JANPIA) (2024)

FY2024 Activity Support Organization (Grant) Call Guidelines — Japan Network for Public Interest Activities (JANPIA) (2024)

On the Dormant Deposits Utilization Scheme — Cabinet Office (2026)