The National Lottery Community Fund (UK Office: Leaders with Lived Experience 2020
Overview
This programme builds on the Leaders with Lived Experience Pilot Programme. And will award National Lottery funding to support lived experience leadership as they move through the COVID-19 crisis.
Because of the impact of COVID-19, there is an opportunity to help lived experience to play a key role in shaping how communities move towards recovery and renewal.
This is important, because leaders with lived experience and their organisations have the local and community knowledge, and a deep-rooted understanding of the challenges their communities face, to help renew communities.
The funding is for up to two years so you can either focus on the immediate response to the COVID-19 crisis, or helping communities recover and renew after the impact of COVID-19, or both.
Who can Apply?
You can apply if your organisation:
- was set up by a lived experience leader
- is run by a lived experience leader
- has leadership that reflects the people it wants to support.
Your organisation also needs to be a:
- voluntary or community organisation
- registered charity
- constituted group or club
- not-for-profit company or community interest company.
Previous funding
You can apply for this funding, even if your organisation has already applied to them for COVID-19 funding, whether your application was successful or unsuccessful. Your application could have been to the Coronavirus Community Support Fund (CCSF) in England, or to their COVID-19 funding in Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales.
But the project activities you apply to the Leaders with Lived Experience 2020 Programme for cannot be the same as any other application you've submitted to The National Lottery Community Fund, including to the CCSF.
If you’re not sure if you can apply Contact them. You can also check what other funding programmes you might be able to apply to.
Funding Priorities
They want to fund projects that meet their funding priorities:
- lived experience leadership can be central in developing strategies for the renewal of civil society through and beyond the COVID-19 crisis
- supporting and developing lived experience leadership at all levels of an organisation
- creating new opportunities for lived experience leaders and lived experience-led organisations to be central to any COVID-19 recovery and renewal response.
What do they mean by 'lived experience leader'?
Someone who uses their first-hand experience of a social issue to create positive change for communities and people who share those experiences (and works with them to do that).
For example, they think of a lived experience leader as:
- someone who has been homeless who is working to improve homelessness services
- a person with HIV who has set up and is running a peer-to-peer support service for other people with HIV
- a person who has lost a loved one to suicide who has set up and is running a support group for others who have lost someone to suicide.
A lived experience leader is not:
- a non-disabled person who has volunteered with disabled people, and wants to set up a disability charity
- a parent or carer of someone with HIV who has set up a support group for people with HIV
- a middle-class person who is running a working-class mentoring scheme.
It’s important that all the organisations they fund through this programme are led by lived experience leaders. They want people with lived experience to lead on designing, developing and delivering the activities they’re planning.
What types of projects they'll prioritise
There was a huge amount of demand for funding from the Leaders with Lived Experience Pilot Programme. And they expect they might get a lot of applications for this programme too. So, they wanted to let you know one of the reasons why some projects were more likely to get funding during the pilot programme, to help you when filling out your application.
The projects they were more likely to fund didn’t just show the role of lived experience played in their organisation and in how their project was run. They also wanted to develop and support lived experience leadership.
Here are some examples of projects that might apply for this funding:
- Involving lived experience leaders in designing and delivering services that meet the needs of communities most impacted by COVID-19.
- Creating time and space for lived experience leaders to think more about strategy, objectives and influencing, or developing strategy in general.
- Creating time and space for lived experience leaders to influence how communities recover and renew after the impact of COVID-19, in a strategic way. This might be for a specific geographic area or for a particular sector.
- Developing networks of support and collaboration between lived experience-led organisations, to create strategies that resolve intersections in lived experience. For example, working with Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) care leavers, or disabled people in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer + (LGBTQ+) communities.
- Helping lived experience-led organisations become more resilient and sustainable. For example, through training, personal or professional development, planning to hand leadership over to others, improving digital capacity, or support packages to improve wellbeing.
- Supporting existing projects or creating new projects that help lived experience-led organisations and leaders to meet the needs of the communities they serve during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Supporting existing work or creating new projects that help to prevent crises like COVID-19 from impacting some communities (such as disabled people and BAME communities) more than others.
Projects funded through this programme will become part a network of lived experience-led organisations, alongside organisations funded through the pilot programme. These organisations will have been central to creating strategies to re-shape their communities and put lived experience at the heart of them.
What can they fund?
- equipment (e.g. office equipment)
- one-off events
- staff costs
- training costs
- transport
- utilities/running costs
- volunteer expenses