Behind all the fun of Comic Relief is the serious business of allocating funds to up to 60 social enterprises across the UK.

For the past 11 years Peter Argall, Comic Relief’s UK grants manager, has played a key role in this rigorous process “of interrogation and accountability”.

Although social enterprises are effectively businesses run for the benefit of communities, Argall has to ensure that Comic Relief’s broad aims of tackling poverty and social injustice are at the forefront of his team’s decision making.

The poverty of a starving child in Africa is blindingly obvious but, says Argall, “for some people it can be harder to understand the poverty of experience and expectation, and economic poverty in our own country because of the welfare system.”

Through a series of mostly small grants (up to £5,000 over three years) and a dozen or so larger grants (up to £120,000 over three years) Comic Relief strives “to enable and encourage people in communities who have identified a problem to overcome a lack of resources or services and find the confidence to improve things,” Argall says.

Since a review in 2005, social enterprises have been increasingly included in Comic Relief’s remit alongside, charities, traditional community groups or self-help services.

“Charities are very good,” says Argall, “but (social enterprises) SEs have the capacity to grow social capital and can be more sustainable in the long run. They have real value, especially as the economy weakens.”

He cites two examples where SEs have made a real difference “further down the food chain” - Class One Kids in Gateshead, which recycles school uniforms in the community, and the North Glasgow Community Food Initiative, which encourages low-income participants to grow their own food and share healthy ingredients.

“We want to increase the skills base of the funded company, from its budgeting to its training, but at the same time we want them to provide tangible benefits for communities in need,” Argall says.

Those fortunate enough to receive grants have to agree to meet a range of outcomes, which are then monitored closely. These include providing workshops or conferences “to support local people with local problems”.

“We have a strong commitment to empower local people,” says Argall. “The idea is to teach people how to fish rather than hand them the fish on a plate.”

At a time when local authority and health authority grants are particularly hard to come by, Greig Sandilands, project manager at the North Glasgow Community Food Initiative (www.ngcfi.org.uk), says the Comic Relief funding underpins his 80-strong team of volunteers who sell fruit and vegetables and host cookery classes in low income communities.

“We’re hoping that our social enterprise will allow us to create a market garden so we can operate on a larger scale, offering a vegetable box scheme and classes to teach asylum seekers and those at risk of being homeless how to cook simple, healthy meals on a budget,” says Sandilands.

At Sound Minds (www.soundminds.co.uk), a London-based emerging social enterprise that supports musicians, artists and workshop leaders to access session employment within a mental health programme, any surplus profit is ploughed back into the scheme. “In the past year they’ve helped 31 people into paid employment, who might have been stigmatised elsewhere because of their mental health difficulties,” says Argall.

Paul Brewer, chief executive of Sound Minds, says: “The funding has helped us to open doors in the music industry and market acts.

“A lot of these people are very talented but haven’t been in work for a long time. It’s a boost for their self-esteem once they’ve performed to an appreciative audience.”

Brewer mentions a former member of the group Aswad who played his first gig in many years at the Lambeth Country Show last summer. The last time the reggae star had played on that stage had been in a Rock Against Racism concert alongside Elvis Costello in 1978.

“When the crowds see these people back on stage they realise that they have something to offer,” says Brewer.

This year’s Red Nose Day is on Friday 13 March. For more information visit www.rednoseday.com