Reaching the parts

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As Fair Share gets under way, Gerald Oppenheim and Richard Hill explain how it will work

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At the beginning of March, the Community Fund and the New Opportunities Fund announced the 51 local authority areas in England, six in Scotland and five in Wales that would benefit from the Fair Share initiative over the three years from April 2002 to March 2005. There will be a separate announcement about Fair Share in Northern Ireland later in the year. Right across the UK, the areas have been selected according to where they rank on the relevant deprivation indices, and the level of Lottery funding received so far from all distributors. We have used only grants programmes with a local focus as the basis of the calculation.

What is important now is what Fair Share aims to achieve over the next three years. The key is to make Lottery funding more readily available to disadvantaged communities in those named areas that have so far not received their fair share and to support projects developed by and for those communities. The reasons why some areas have not benefited as much as they might have done are complex and will vary from place to place. Improvement will require changes to the way funding is accessed as well as some investment in the capacity of poorer communities to take advantage of what is available.

One of the most important things Fair Share can do is to help build capacity in those communities to bid in future not only for Lottery funds but for other sources of finance. Fair Share can also support the development of social capital, give people a chance to participate fully in their local communities and contribute to improving the quality of life where they live. Examples of what Fair Share could do might include: 

supporting the services that local charities, voluntary and community organisations can provide to meet local needs; 

building capacity in local communities to enable them to become involved in local regeneration, and to support community assets and planning; 

building up social capital, including support for social enterprises, local time-banks of volunteers and training; 

improving local environments, enabling communities to make them safer, healthier, greener, cleaner, better designed, more welcoming and accessible to all groups in the community.

The Community Fund and New Opportunities Fund are going to take complementary approaches to delivering Fair Share which take account of their different ways of making funding available. In each Fair Share area, a ‘local delivery plan’ will be drawn up on the basis of consultation with local groups and other important key players, including local authorities and other significant funders. In turn this will help the two distributors understand where work is needed to encourage applications to come forward so that resources can be targeted. Typically, local authority areas will include wards where disadvantage is particularly acute and both distributors want to do their best to ensure Fair Share resources get into those areas. We hope our joint approach will also have the benefit of allowing the other Lottery distributors with their own target programmes to join in the initiative where there is common ground. Similarly, we hope to encourage links in those areas where other government funding schemes operate and other funders are active.

There will be different ways of reaching communities in different areas. All of this will be driven by what is needed locally and what can be shown to work. This may mean different approaches not just between the four countries of the UK but between different local authority areas in the same countries.

The Community Fund’s resources will be in the form of grants for up to three years to charitable and other eligible voluntary and community-based groups. Funding can be used to support and develop the local voluntary sector infrastructure as well as service provision to deal with local needs. For example, the beneficiaries could be young people, older people, minority ethnic communities; projects could be targeted on particular needs to deal with, for instance, drug and alcohol or homelessness problems. Consultation and the local delivery plans will identify what each area needs.

The New Opportunities Fund will provide funding over three years to improve the physical environment and quality of life of communities, including the promotion of healthier lifestyles by improving the appearance and amenities of the local environment to show how local community involvement can really help to change things.

The New Opportunities Fund is also going to provide some longer-term funding of up to 10 years through ‘expendable endowments’ to build social capital and the capacity of communities. This approach will help to deal with criticisms that Lottery funding is sometimes too short-term in areas that need a longer-term investment. Both distributors hope that their complementary approaches will encourage local people to be involved in determining the sort of projects they need. We also hope that the resources put into building local capacity will mean that in future local organisations will be better placed not only to access lottery funding but also to take advantage of what other funders have to offer, be that government, local authorities or charitable trust funders.

We are also going to put in place a long-term evaluation which over five years will look at what is happening on the ground through Fair Share funding, to build up a UK-wide picture. And we will keep a close eye on grant applications and the value of what’s being approved so that we can be sure of meeting the financial targets within the local delivery plans by the time March 2005 comes round. Both distributors are convinced that this initiative can make a real difference to people’s lives through genuine local collaborations. 

Gerald Oppenheim is Director of Policy & Communications at the Community Fund Richard Hill is Head of Policy at the New Opportunities Fund