Bringing our community-led missions to life

Tom Walters, Deputy Director of Impact, updates on our community-led missions and the difference we want our funding to make.

It’s one of the great pleasures of my work to help share the impact of the amazing projects we support day in, day out. At the same time, I’m passionate about focusing our funding, influence and work with our partners to make an even bigger impact in the years to come.

In making this happen, our priorities are guided by our four missions, which support communities to:

• come together
• be environmentally sustainable
• help children and young people thrive
• live healthier lives.

In the Corporate Plan that we launched in May, we committed to developing and implementing a framework to outline these missions in more detail. We’ve achieved this by working with communities, grantholders and subject matter experts.

The results that we are publishing today set out the difference we want our funding to make for each of our community missions – from providing inclusive local spaces and activities (helping communities come together), to giving babies and children a positive start in life (helping children and young people thrive).

The framework is a list of priority outcomes for each mission, which the majority of projects that we fund will contribute towards. Today I’m delighted to share this with you, and bring each mission to life so we can work with you to ensure the greatest results for communities.

Using the missions framework

Take a look at the detail of the missions and our practical guidance to help you understand the difference we want to achieve, supporting you with future funding applications.

For all new grant applications, we will be asking which (if any) missions the project focuses on, to help make it easier for you to tell us the intended results of your project. We’ll do this in a quick and easy way as part of our tried and tested application processes.

We know that our missions don’t exist in isolation – while a project may tackle any one of these, we also fund lots of projects that contribute to community outcomes from more than one mission, without detracting from the main purpose of the project.

The guidance is designed to help you understand what this means in practice. We hope this makes it as clear and straightforward as possible to apply for funding.

Why is it important?

We are committed to being transparent about the difference we want to see and the impact we plan to make, measuring this impact as effectively as we can.

The information submitted through applications will help us gather robust data on what projects aim to achieve with our funding. This will help us continue to design the most helpful, intuitive funding options – so we can make a bigger difference and improve outcomes for communities. It also means we can more easily adjust our offer to respond to what communities need in the years ahead.

This underpins how we’ll support projects in every part of the UK, taking an equity-based approach to tackle inequality and focusing most where there is the greatest need.

What’s next?

Using the missions as the cornerstone of our work, we are launching new funding portfolios across the UK that reflect funding needs across the UK, and developing a new impact strategy that we plan to release in early 2025.

Across this work, we’ll support communities to build from their strengths. We’ll support what matters most on the ground, including long-term investment to address deep-rooted challenges. And we’ll strive to continually improve customer experience, offering simple and quick funding routes where appropriate.

I’m looking forward to the challenges ahead, and continuing to unlock the great potential within our civil society.