The Cabinet Office has launched a two-year £36m programme to encourage volunteering and social action.

The initiative, the Centre for Social Action, will begin in April 2013 and support organisations who want to mobilise people to take part in social action.

It follows on from the Cabinet Office’s £20m Social Action Fund which closed for application in February 2012.

A Cabinet Office spokesman could not confirm whether the £36m in funding support from the Centre for Social Action would be grants or other types of investment, saying it would be a “mixture of product structures” with more details becoming available in April.

Within the new Centre for Social Action, innovation charity Nesta will run a new Innovation Fund which will be backed by £10m from the Cabinet Office and £4m from Nesta.

Nesta’s public services lab executive director, Philip Colligan, has been appointed to the Cabinet Office as government adviser on social innovation and will advise on the wider strategy of the Centre.

Separately, Nesta has given out nearly £900,000 in funding from its Innovation in Giving Fund to five organisations, including Care4Care, a membership organisation where members spend a few hours a week supporting an older person in their local community and in return earn time credits that they can use to build up their own care pension.

Since its launch, the Innovation in Giving Fund has supported 67 organisations. All awardees of the Innovation in Giving Fund at giving.nesta.org.uk .