Grants of up to £5 Million Available to Foster Stronger Community Connections

Deadline: No deadline

Charities and other not-for-profit organisations that want to help communities come together and make the UK a better-connected society can apply for grants of between £500,000 and £5 million through the National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF)—UK Fund.

The fund is open to UK-based registered charities, community interest companies, charitable incorporated organisations, community benefit societies, co-operative societies, constituted voluntary or community organisations, statutory bodies, companies limited by guarantee, and partnerships of organisations.

The fund will fund up to 20 organisations annually for projects that can run for up to 10 years.

The fund is looking to support projects that:

• Improve relationships between people with different life experiences. For example, bring together people from different backgrounds, generations, or places.
• Help people and communities who find it difficult to meet face-to-face to make meaningful connections online - For example, because of physical or mental health or poor transport links. Or because they live far apart from other people who have a shared identity or experience to them.
• Help people from all backgrounds influence the future of their communities, such as by setting up ways for communities to influence decisions that affect them.
• Help children and young people facing specific challenges change the systems that affect them by making their voices heard and acted on.
• Help more organisations involve and listen to children and young people, using what they say to improve their communities and the systems and services they rely on.

The funding can be used for:

• Staff costs, including sessional workers
• Development work (testing new ways of working, staff training and development, developing governance, tech or IT upgrades and purchases, sharing learning)
• Transport
• Utilities and running costs
• Volunteer expenses
• Learning and evaluation
• Equipment
• Capital costs (we can consider funding capital costs but do not expect these costs to be a significant amount of the proposed budget)
• Costs associated with delivering your project in other languages – for example, in Welsh.

Projects must demonstrate that they have the potential to benefit communities across the UK, scale their impact, and focus on equity.

There is no deadline and applications can be submitted at any time.

For more information / to apply visit: www.tnlcommunityfund.org.uk/funding/programmes/the-uk-fund