The National Lottery Community Fund: People and Communities

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Overview

People and Communities are here to help and want to talk to you about your ideas to support communities. You can apply for funding to deliver new or existing activity or to change and adapt to new and future challenges, including the current cost-of-living crisis.

Who can apply?

You can apply if:

Unregistered voluntary or community organisation
Registered charity (unincorporated)
Charitable incorporated organisation (CIO)
Not-for-profit company

If you’re not sure if you can apply - Contact them.

What kind of work do they fund?

They fund projects that work to make positive changes in their community – whether that’s a community living in the same area, or people with similar interests or life experiences.

They're looking for projects that:

help people make changes to improve their lives
help communities build on their strengths and share things they’ve learned.

They can also support you to change and adapt to new and future challenges, including the current cost-of-living crisis.

A good application should be:

Community-led

They believe that people understand what's needed in their communities better than anyone. So it’s important to them that you involve your community in the design, development and delivery of the activities you’re planning.

You might want to ask yourself:

Have I spoken to the people in my community?
Have the people in my community told me what they need and what’s important to them?
Have I listened to them and used what they’ve said to create my project?

Strengths-based

They’d like to support people and communities to build on the knowledge, skills and experience they already have, to make the changes they want.

You might want to ask yourself:

What’s already working in my community?
How will my project add to these positive things that are already working?
How will my project make the most of any resources that are already helping my community?

Connected

They want to know that you’ve a good understanding of other activities and services in your community. They’d like to see how you’ll compliment these. So you can add value to what’s already there.

You might want to ask yourself:

Have I spoken to other groups in the area that are doing something similar to my project?
Have I thought about how we can all help each other?

Extra guidance that might be useful

Land and Buildings guidance (PDF 3MB)

We do checks on the information you give us. As an organisation that gives out public funds, we carry out some checks on the information you give to us.

Learn more about our checks.

Environmental Impact

They encourage and support all projects and communities to consider their environmental impact when designing their projects.

For example, if your project requires a vehicle to help support your community, they expect you to have considered whether an electric or hybrid option is a viable alternative to petrol or diesel. Electric or hybrid vehicles will help reduce your projects carbon footprint, but it can also save you money on fuel, tax, and servicing.

If your project involves a building tey expect you to consider how you can reduce its environmental impact and therefore its running costs.

This could include:

Choosing to use more sustainable, environmentally friendly or recycled materials as much as possible
Conserving water by ‘harvesting’ rainwater (it is free after all) with water butts or reusing ‘grey’ water (the water from sinks, showers, washing machines, etc.) to flush toilets
Reducing the amount of energy your building needs by installing energy efficient lighting and low energy appliances. Or even consider generating your own energy by installing solar panels
Reducing the amount of heat your building making sure your building is a well-insulated as possible or consider more efficient alternatives to oil or gas such as infra-red heating, heat pumps or biomass boilers
Consider what will happen to all the waste that will be generated from your building project and commit to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible.

What can you spend the money on?

They can fund:

staff salaries
training
volunteer expenses
equipment
premises costs
evaluation
overheads.

For COVID-19 related ideas, we encourage you to think about any costs needed to help you and your community through the current crisis. As well as the costs to deliver your activity, this might include: