Community-led missions

Ellesmere Children’s Centre, England
  1. About
  2. The National Lottery Community Fund Strategy 2023 – 2030
  3. Community-led missions

Our four community-led missions

Our conversations over the last year have informed where we’ll provide greater focus in supporting communities and shaped our four community-led funding missions. We'll support communities to:

Our funding has always supported these areas. Now we’re going further, focusing our funding, impact and work with partners around these to make a bigger impact.

Understanding our missions

To help you understand what our missions mean and how they affect your funding applications, we’ve developed a new missions framework that describes what community outcomes we expect projects to contribute towards.

For all new grant applications, we will be asking which (if any) areas of the missions the project focuses on, to help us better understand the intended results of our funding.

We know that our missions aren’t completely separate – your project might focus on one mission, but it could support one or more of the other missions at the same time.

Missions framework video guide

Take a look at this short video, which shows some of the expected impacts of each mission and how they overlap – with examples.

Equity (treating people according to their needs) is really important to us across the framework. This is a key consideration across all four missions in our funding decisions.

You can also download our missions framework overview, for some more detail in a handy guide you can refer back to.

It’s really important we collect accurate information on what outcomes your project will achieve, as this will help us keep improving our funding options.

Find out more