The National Lottery Community Fund is launching a new fund that aims to offer grants of up to £300,000 over the next year to support communities across the UK.

The Bringing People Together programme will open to applications on 30 March and will look to hand out 20 grants over the next 12 months for projects that are working across a minimum of two countries in the UK.

The fund aims to help and connect communities as UK society recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic.

“While some communities have continued to be, or even enhanced how connected they are in the last year, we know others have not,” said Emma Robinson, NLCF portfolio manager.

“The contrasts experienced by different communities throughout the last year has served to shine a stark light on deep-rooted inequalities that existed before the pandemic.

“We believe it is more important now, than ever before, that people are connected to each other.

“For us bringing people and communities together is core to our purpose and goals and that’s why we are launching a new dedicated funding programme to support this work.

“The Bringing People Together programme will fund ideas that enable communities to thrive by creating the conditions, infrastructure and social fabric that enable better and longer lasting ways of bringing people and communities together.”
The NLCF also promises to fund projects that “experiment with doing things differently”.

“Through the grants we make we want to see people from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences being brought together to make real change in their communities; activities that have agency, power and influence, that can go beyond one-off social events to a place where people are leading the change they want to see, working together in collective action,” Robinson added.

“We expect that projects funded through the Bringing People Together programme will be collaborative at heart, and have a strong focus on sharing learning, insight and good practice that enables generous leadership and working together.”

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