Online petition to prevent London Olympics grabbing Lottery funds
Howard Lake | 23 February 2007 | News
NCVO is supporting an online petition on the 10 Downing Street website asking the Prime Minister to defend funding for local voluntary and community organisations against the possibility of National Lottery funds being diverted to pay the £900 million shortfall in the cost of the 2012 London Olympics.
The petition by Helen Anderson of South Witham Broadband has so far attracted 3,872 signatures, but has some time to run: the deadline for support is 22 May 2007.
The petition argues that “the Government should fund the Olympics without depriving the National Lottery distributors of funds needed to support local voluntary and community sector activities.”
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If the Government does use the good causes money to fund the 2012 Olympics, Ms Anderson claims that “the Big Lottery Fund, Sport England, the Arts Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund will all lose large amounts of money, much of which otherwise would go to the local voluntary and community sector.”
NCVO has promoted the petition as part of its Olympic Lottery Campaign, and recently used its website’s front page to encourage people to sign it.
The defund funding petition has sadly not excited the levels of public interest and support achieved by the travel tax petition. When it closed this week, 1,791,942 people had registered their objection to road pricing and supported further expenditure on improving roads.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.