Community power at the heart of our funding in England
England funding portfolio 2025-2030: Putting community agency, power and control at the heart of our funding
Following last year’s launch of the National Lottery Community Fund’s seven-year strategy ‘It Starts With Community’, there are exciting changes taking place to how we will distribute over £3 billion to England’s communities.
Our ambition is to create resilient communities that are more inclusive and environmentally sustainable by funding activities and organisations that strengthen society and improve lives across the UK. Here we describe the changes we will make in England to meet that ambition by 2030.
Community agency, power and control will be at the heart of our England funding portfolio. We will stand alongside communities, supporting them as they tackle their challenges and fulfil their potential. We will increase our investment in the building blocks of community-led change, with a particular focus on communities where people feel least in control.
Targeting our funding to drive change
Society faces some big and urgent challenges, so we will prioritise England’s funding where we think we can make the most difference. We will take an equity-based approach to tackling inequality across our whole portfolio. That means we will be shifting our funding over time to invest most in places, people and communities in England who experience poverty, disadvantage, and discrimination.
In line with the Fund’s new strategy, we will prioritise funding the following:
| ‘It Starts With Community’ England thematic funding | England thematic funding areas of focus |
|---|---|
| Supporting communities to come together | Inclusive places and activities, prioritising communities least able to help people come together |
| Supporting communities to enable people to live healthier lives | Tackling health inequalities |
| Supporting communities to help children and young people to thrive | Supporting babies, children, young people and their families to navigate key transitions in their lives |
| Supporting communities to be environmentally sustainable | Environmental justice and access to quality nature |
Because big and urgent challenges appear different in different places, our regional teams across England will publish plans that bring together these areas of focus. We’ll identify places where we would like to fund more activity for each region annually, starting by the end of 2025. Over half of our funding portfolio will be allocated locally, through our regional teams. We’ll align the criteria of our flagship Reaching Communities open funding programme with the England thematic areas of focus from summer 2025.
Partnering for bolder, long-term impact
We know there is huge power in working with others and we can’t deliver our community-led missions alone. That’s why we want to go further than before, offering more than funding by making connections and building deep partnerships across our whole portfolio. It will be important to all our work in England and will be driven by the principles we have set out below in the section on Equity and Partnerships.
As a first step, we will launch a new route to partner with us at a regional and national level in spring 2025. Around the same time, we will close our current open partnerships programme to new applications.
We want to drive bolder change in two specific areas where the scale of our current funding does not match the size and urgency of the challenge England’s communities face:
- Partnering with organisations that share our mission to support the communities in England most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and least able to engage in environmental action. We will work in partnership to support our efforts to become a regenerative funder.
- Partnering with organisations who demonstrate our equity-based approach to tackling inequality in England. We’ll set up a Solidarity Fund, worth at least 10% of our portfolio or £50m per year to 2028, providing long-term core funding to organisations tackling the root causes of poverty, discrimination, and disadvantage in our communities.
At a national level, in our mission area supporting babies, children and young people, we will build on the learning from A Better Start and invest £150m in a National Early Years Partnership. We will also invest £10m in a National Youth Work Leadership Partnership to support a thriving, skilled and sustainable youth sector. More details will follow later in the year on these children and young peoples’ partnerships.
We will have more to say in the future about partnering with us – including for our Health mission in England, where we are interested in working together with others to address health inequalities and influence system change.
Not all communities start from the same place
Communities are demanding bolder, longer-term change and more power to shape the future. Delivering our community-led missions rests on people feeling empowered to make a difference. But not all of us feel we have the power and agency to be part of the change. That’s why we want to increase our investment in the building blocks of community-led change, with a particular focus on the places where people feel least in control.
We’ll set up a new Community Power Fund – a ten year investment of £100m in dozens of neighbourhoods in England to increase agency and control within communities and beyond. We’ll invest in projects that aim to build community empowerment in the neighbourhoods with the lowest levels of community agency and control. Find out how you can work with us to develop the Community Power Fund.
We’ll dedicate at least 5% of our £500m portfolio each year to a new You Decide funding stream. Through it, communities will directly decide which good causes our funding should support. Find out how you can work with us to develop the You Decide funding stream.
We will continue this year’s increase to the amount of grassroots grants funding through our Awards for All funding programme, by committing to at least £135m of awards per year up to 2030. Our grassroots grants will always be for all England’s communities, but we’ll aim to fund more projects that align with our thematic areas of focus and priority places.
We will dedicate £150m to building the resilience of existing and developing civil society organisations and communities. We’ll focus on longer-term investment in those who work with people facing the greatest challenges. We will design a support programme with partners, which will launch in Autumn 2025. Find out how you can work with us to develop our support programme.
We’ll set up a new partner designed 2030 Community Leaders Programme. By 2030 we’ll have backed several thousand people who are leading change in their communities across England with a starting investment of £50m. We’ll focus on young people and people under-represented in formal community leadership positions.
We will dedicate up to £100m each year to support communities to access and improve the natural environment and tackle climate change, representing a doubling of current levels of investment in England. We will also invest at least £75m in supporting all our grant holders to make a positive environmental impact. We’ll make environmental sustainability costs eligible within all grants and offer support to all grant holders to improve their environmental impact.
Our Missions in England
Supporting communities to come together
We will focus on inclusive places and activities, prioritising communities in England currently least able to bring people together. We’ll support community activities in those places that help empower people to make a difference.
This means we will invest in inclusive and accessible meeting places in areas that most lack them, and more of this will be in the form of physical buildings and outdoor facilities to leave a legacy after our investment is complete.
We'll do this in a way that gives people and organisations funds for activities and their effective delivery to help sustain these new and improved meeting places for the longer term.
This will be the community focus for our open and responsive funding. We’ll align the criteria of our flagship Reaching Communities open funding programme with this England thematic area of focus from Summer 2025.
In addition, across 2025 we will be announcing new partnering initiatives focusing on Community Power and Community Leadership. Further details are given in our main announcement, but we wanted to take the opportunity here to explain what we mean by these terms for our Communities Mission. We’ll develop these programmes working closely with partners, so anything we say here is subject to change and refinement – including the programme names.
Community power – we want to support people and communities to influence and shape the places they live, the services they use and the decisions that affect their lives. Several common features influence peoples’ collective agency and ability to control things at the community level. These include their opportunities to connect with each other, their confidence, their power to make decisions, the availability and size of funding for change, the state of existing community relationships, trust and belonging, and the extent to which they believe they can make change happen. We’ll make a ten-year investment of £100m across dozens of neighbourhoods in England to increase agency and control within communities.
Community leadership – in our strategy we said we will support people and communities to shape the future and lead change and this is for people of all backgrounds. Using our position and influence, we’ll celebrate and promote the power of communities to strengthen society and improve lives. We plan to back hundreds of people in informal leadership roles who are leading change in their communities across England with a total starting investment of £50m.
Supporting communities to enable people to live healthier lives
In England, our Health mission will focus on tackling health inequalities amongst people experiencing poverty, disadvantage and discrimination. To do this, we will be looking for proposals that address wider social factors that result in poor health outcomes. We will also take strategic focuses on some specific causes of health inequalities starting with health inequalities stemming from structural racism and discrimination.
Health inequalities are unfair and avoidable differences in health across the population, and between different groups within society. These include how long people are likely to live, the health conditions they may experience and the care that is available to them. In England, people living in poverty are dying younger and spending more time in ill health. Reducing health inequalities is a matter of fairness and social justice. Action on health inequalities requires action across the wider social and economic circumstances that influence health throughout an individual’s life. These are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. Low income, unequal access to health and social care, lack of education, stigma, and racism are underlying, contributing factors of health inequities. The impact is pervasive and deeply embedded in our society, creating inequities in access to a range of social, welfare and economic benefits—such as housing, education, wealth, and employment. These inequities put people at higher risk of poor health. The way these challenges combine and interact with each other also influences people’s experiences.
We recognise there is a role for us all in tackling structural discrimination and racism in systems, social forces, institutions, ideologies and cultural biases, and processes. Evidence outlines that these factors and their connectedness shape and limit the social and economic conditions of historically marginalised groups such as Black and Asian communities, Gypsy & Roma Travellers, LGBTQ+ individuals, and disabled people. That's why we cannot address the inequities among different groups without also funding communities to have more influence in shaping decisions around the health system and to support health leaders to better reflect their communities.
We will align the criteria of our flagship Reaching Communities open funding programme with the England thematic area of focus for Health from Summer 2025.
Supporting Communities to help children and young people to thrive
For this mission in England, we will focus on supporting babies, children, and young people of all ages 0-25 years plus their families to navigate key transitions in their lives. We aim to leave them with improved social and emotional skills for the future.
Social and emotional skills are the life skills to manage your emotions, have empathy for others, build relationships, solve problems, and make responsible decisions. They help children and young people build resilience.
Children and young people’s key life transitions are moments of significant change that may be planned (change in education setting, leaving education, leaving care, end of life preparation) or unexpected (bereavement, school exclusion, family change of circumstances, medical diagnosis, making a life choices). They can negatively impact children's health, wellbeing, and future success. These life transitions are complex and often occur alongside the physical and psychological changes of adolescence and the growth into adulthood. We know that these changes can be much more challenging for some children and young people. For example – those from Black and minoritised communities, Care Experienced Young People, Young Carers, and those with disabilities or with Special Educational Needs.
Preventative work - children and young people are facing uncertainty and instability because of multiple challenges including climate change, recovery from the recent pandemic, mental health, and the cost-of-living crisis. We know that preventative work promotes resilience and a supportive environment, empowering families, children, and young people to make informed choices or embrace a healthier lifestyle, contributing to their overall well-being and long-term success.
This will be the children and young people focus for our open and responsive funding - We’ll align the criteria of our flagship Reaching Communities open funding programme with this England thematic areas of focus from Summer 2025.
In addition, in Spring 2025, we will be announcing new partnering initiatives. At a national level, in our mission area supporting babies, children and young people (0-25 years), we will build on the learning from A Better Start and invest £150m in a National Early Years Partnership. We will also invest £10m in a National Youth Work Leadership Partnership to support a thriving, skilled and sustainable youth sector. More details will follow later on these two partnerships.
Supporting communities to be environmentally sustainable
Our Environment Mission in England will take a multi-pronged approach with a focus on both environmental injustice and access to quality nature. We’ll support communities most at risk of the negative impacts of climate change, and/or least able to have a voice or participate in solutions.
Environmental injustice - Climate change is now considered the greatest threat to us all. Key risks in England include extreme temperatures, river flooding and coastal flooding. But we know some communities are at greater risk. For example, pollution and extremes of weather can aggravate people’s existing health conditions, or if people live in poor-quality housing that is expensive to heat or cool. Those same communities say they feel poorly considered in emergency planning or do not feel empowered to tackle the causes or adapt to the changing climate. Yet, taking part in environmental action presents opportunities. For example, savings on bills, skills or jobs in the green economy, or improved health and wellbeing from taking part in nature-based activity. Excluded and marginalised communities face barriers to participation or lack the resources to access some of these benefits. For these communities, climate change is a social justice issue.
Access to quality nature – by saying ‘quality’, we recognise the importance of natural space for our health and wellbeing, but also the need for that space to be designed and maintained with nature in mind. That should help alleviate the negative impacts of climate change and reverse declines in biodiversity. Not all space that ‘looks green’ is necessarily good for wildlife or biodiversity. The environment produces our food, regulates our water and our air. A high-quality natural environment therefore helps tackle some of the consequences of climate change such as protection from flooding, but also improves the food chain, supplies clean drinking water, and controls nutrients in the soil. Access to our natural environment is good for us. And interaction with the natural environment helps build awareness of the importance of protecting and improving our natural world. But access is not equal. Marginalized and excluded communities face barriers to access, and with increased pressure on outdoor spaces, communities need quality natural environment close by. The nature crisis is therefore not just an environmental issue, but an economic and social issue because of the way it affects the supplies of our food and water, the economy and individual well-being.
We have committed to taking positive action that seeks to regrow, renew, or restore the environment, nature, and biodiversity. In Spring 2025, we will start partnering with organisations who share our mission to support the communities in England most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and / or least able to engage in environmental action. We will dedicate up to £100m each year to our efforts across these two areas of focus to become an environmentally regenerative funder.
We want to help VCSE organisations to make a positive environmental impact in their communities. We believe that VCSEs can improve their environmental sustainability through leadership, within their buildings, and in the delivery of activity. We know they often lack the resources to take environmental action, even where they would like to do so. We also hope that if community organisations can become more environmentally sustainable from doing activities in a sustainable way, they will become advocates and role-models for their communities.
This will be the environment focus for our open and responsive funding. We’ll align the criteria of our flagship Reaching Communities open funding programme with this England thematic area of focus from Summer 2025. And in the future, eligible spend across all our England grant making and all missions will include costs associated with environmental sustainability. This might include covering the costs incurred by doing an activity differently or additional grants for specific work. As part of our grant holder support, we are also considering how we might fund environment-related development costs or audits where they are required. We will invest at least £75m in supporting all our grant holders to make a positive environmental impact.
Our Equity and Partnership Approach in England
We are on a journey with our approach to equity – like many organisations we aim to be ambitious in this area and we know we have some distance to travel. We have committed to taking an equity-based approach to tackling inequality across our whole portfolio. That means we will be shifting our funding over time to invest most in places, people and communities in England who experience poverty, disadvantage, and discrimination. This follows and accelerates the trend with our recent responsive funding awards in England, which are increasingly focused on those most in need due to high levels of demand.
Our work will aim to support communities to build from their strengths. We’ll support what matters most to different communities, including long-term investment to address deep-rooted challenges.
Under our new partnering approach, we will be looking to work together with organisations who demonstrate our equity-based approach to tackling inequality in England. We’ll set up a Solidarity Fund, worth at least 10% of our portfolio, starting with £50m per year to 2028, providing long-term core funding for up to 10 years and development grants to organisations tackling the root causes of poverty, discrimination, and disadvantage in our communities. We’ll be designing this equity-focused fund by working closely with partners on its development.
Deep Partnerships: We want our partnerships in future to be long term and characterised by:
- the Fund bringing more than funding to the relationship
- the other parties bringing something of value to the relationship
- the Fund having some role in decision making and/or direction setting, but will not necessarily be the only partner with this role
- a clearly articulated and measurable purpose agreed and backed by all partners, aligned with our Fund goal to strengthen society and improve lives. The mutual purpose could be around our community led missions, equity based approach to tackling inequality, or being ‘more than a funder’ (This list is not exhaustive).
Definitions
We defined a range of useful terms when we published the outcomes framework for our strategy ‘It Starts with Community’:
Here are three key ones:
Community: a group of people connected through a shared identity, which might come from a shared interest or experience, e.g. living in the same place or coming from a similar background.
People: individuals, including project beneficiaries and people working for community organisations. We are thinking about people from all backgrounds.
Equity: treating people according to their needs. This is important across everything we do.
Below, we define and explain some additional phrases that relate to the England thematic funding areas of focus:
Access to quality nature – by saying ‘quality’, we recognise the importance of natural space for our health and wellbeing, but also the need for that space to be designed and maintained with nature in mind. Not all space that ‘looks green’ is necessarily good for wildlife or biodiversity. The environment produces our food, regulates our water and our air. A high-quality natural environment helps tackle some of the consequences of climate change such as protection from flooding, but also improves the food chain, supplies clean drinking water, and controls nutrients in the soil. Access to our natural environment is good for us. But access is not equal. Marginalized and excluded communities face barriers to access, and with increased pressure on outdoor spaces, communities need quality natural environment close by.
Children and young people’s key life transitions - are moments of significant change that may be planned (change in education setting, leaving education, leaving care, end of life preparation) or unexpected (bereavement, school exclusion, family change of circumstances, medical diagnosis, making a life choices). They can negatively impact children's health, wellbeing, and future success. We know that these changes can be much more challenging for some children and young people. For example – those from Black and minoritised communities, Care Experienced Young People, Young Carers, and those with disabilities or with Special Educational Needs.
Community agency and control – Several common features influence peoples’ collective agency and ability to control things at the community level. These include their opportunities to connect with each other, their confidence, their power to make decisions, the availability and size of funding for change, the state of existing community relationships, trust and belonging, and the extent to which they believe they can make change happen.
Community leadership – in our strategy we said we will support people and communities to shape the future and lead change. We will enable people of all backgrounds to shape the future of their communities. Using our position and influence, we’ll celebrate and promote the power of communities to strengthen society and improve lives.
Environmental injustice - Climate change is now considered the greatest threat to us all. Key risks in England include extreme temperatures, river flooding and coastal flooding. But we know some communities are at greater risk. For example, pollution and extremes of weather can aggravate people’s existing health conditions, or if people live in poor-quality housing that is expensive to heat or cool. Those same communities say they feel poorly considered in emergency planning or do not feel empowered to tackle the causes or adapt to the changing climate. Excluded and marginalised communities face barriers to participation or lack the resources to access some of these benefits. For these communities, climate change is a social justice issue.
Environmentally regenerative funder – This means moving from a position of working to "do less harm to the environment" to one of "making a positive environmental impact". As a funder, we have committed to take positive action that seeks to regrow, renew, or restore the environment, nature, and biodiversity.
Environmental sustainability costs – Eligible spend across all our England grant making will include costs associated with environmental sustainability. We will fund sustainable practice, nature, and environmental improvements. This might include covering the costs incurred by doing an activity differently or additional grants for specific work. As part of our grant holder support, we are also considering how we might fund environment-related development costs or audits where they are required.
Equity-based approach - This means across all our work with communities and our four missions, we’ll invest most in places, people and communities who experience poverty, disadvantage, and discrimination. We’ll support what matters most to different communities, including long-term investment to address deep-rooted challenges.
Health inequalities - are unfair and avoidable differences in health across the population, and between different groups within society. These include how long people are likely to live, the health conditions they may experience and the care that is available to them.
Inclusive places and activities - address any barriers (physical, practical, mental or emotional) so that no one is excluded. This means we will invest in inclusive and accessible meeting places in areas that most lack them.
Intersectionality is the idea that all inequality is linked, and that people are often facing multiple sources of inequality at the same time. Intersectionality is a tool for understanding invisible power relations and how they shape inequality.
Positive environmental impact – we want to help VCSE organisations to make a positive environmental impact in their communities. We believe that VCSEs can improve their environmental sustainability through leadership, within their buildings, and the delivery of activity. We know they often lack the resources to take environmental action, even where they would like to do so. We hope that if community organisations can become more environmentally sustainable from doing activities in a sustainable way, they will become advocates and role-models for their communities.
Preventative work with children and young people - We know that preventative work promotes resilience and a supportive environment, empowering families, children, and young people to make informed choices or embrace a healthier lifestyle, contributing to their overall well-being and long-term success.
Social and Emotional Skills for children and young people - are the life skills to manage your emotions, have empathy for others, build relationships, solve problems, and make responsible decisions. They help children and young people build resilience.
Social factors of health - These are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. Low incomes, unequal access to health and social care, lack of education, stigma, and racism are underlying, contributing factors of health inequities. These inequities put people at higher risk of poor health.
Structural discrimination and racism – these are the larger systems, social forces, institutions, ideologies, and processes that interact with one another to generate and reinforce inequities among different groups. Structural discrimination and racism limit the social and economic conditions of historically under-represented groups such as Black and Asian communities, Gypsy & Roma Travellers, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people.