National Community Lottery Fund seeks to bring communities together with new UK Fund
Melanie May | 14 July 2023 | News
The National Lottery Community Fund is looking to fund organisations that want to bring communities together and help make a better-connected society, with grants of up to £5mn available.
Its new UK Fund is designed to support communities to connect in ways that better fit changing lives, and is one of the funder’s first significant commitments as part of its new strategy, ‘It starts with community’.
The funding is for ‘ambitious projects that aim to create longer-term, transformational change’. To be eligible for funding, projects must either work across the UK, or be able to inform, influence or scale across the UK.
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Funding between £500,000 and £5mn is available and the National Lottery Community Fund expects most projects to run from two to five years. It may consider funding for up to 10 years, and applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis.
It is looking for projects that:
- strengthen relationships between people whose experiences of life have not been the same. For example, relationships between people of different ethnic backgrounds, generations, occupations or geographies
- create connections between online and offline worlds
- help make sure people from all backgrounds can shape the future of their communities.
Information on eligibility and the application can be found here.
The National Lottery Community Fund will be holding twice-weekly online gatherings from Monday, 17 July for people to find out more about The UK Fund, afterwards which they book a conversation to explain more about their idea for funding. Groups can apply from 4 August onwards. In this first year, the fund expects to be able to support 15-20 projects.
The fund was first mentioned last month, when the National Lottery Community Fund announced that it had earmarked £15 million for a new programme to connect communities. At the same time, it announced a pledge to double the amount of funding available to grassroots projects as part of its new 2030 strategy. This will be delivered through its small grants programme, National Lottery Awards for All. The amount groups can apply for has risen from £10,000 to £20,000 with the term doubling from 1 year to 2 years. These changes come into effect from Autumn this year. It has also earmarked an additional £9 million for its Climate Action Fund, taking its total investment in climate action to £35 million this year.
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About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.