Fair Share endowments

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The New Opportunities Fund’s £50m endowment-style fund, which forms the bulk of its Fair Share contribution, will be coming on-stream in early spring, after the main partnership contract has been signed next month with the Community Foundation Network. The Community Foundation Network is NOF’s sole partner UK-wide for this pillar of the Fair Share scheme, and it will need to establish a formal trust to oversee the management of the money. NOF initially envisaged a straightforward endowment scheme, in which investment income could help sustain community projects over a long timeframe. But in the current financial climate £50m would generate pitifully small sums for spending, so the fund will instead be an ‘expendable annuity’, earning interest over its 10-year life-span while also degrading its capital base gradually until there is nothing left at the end of the fixed period. NOF won’t say what it expects the fund to yield in the way of extra cash but it is regarding any interest as marginal and a bonus rather than integral to its plans.

Of England’s 51 Fair Share areas, 45 will be able tap into annuity funding, along with all six Scottish and five Welsh areas. In N Ireland 49 out of 51 Fair Sharewards will be eligible. NOF wrote to local authorities and local strategic partnerships in the summer, outlining how it expected the annuity scheme to work and alerting them to their indicative allocations, which are £800,000 per area in England, £600,000 per area in Wales, variable amounts in Scotland between £450,000 and £1.5m. Allocations have not yet been made among N Ireland beneficiaries. The Community Foundation Network will manage the release of money from the trust to ensure that it does not degrade too quickly, but plans will be drawn up and delivered by CFN’s locally appointed agents. In most cases these will probably be local Community Foundations, but in a few cases other local network bodies may be more suitable. NOF gives the example of a Local Area Network Fund as one possible alternative local agency. Beyond the normal stipulations bout additionality, probity and accountability, NOF says it expects the scope of what may be funded to be very broad. It sees the role of the annuity as fuelling capacity-building but is relaxed about the prospect that this might take the form of a sports or arts project, a community development worker, community safety for schoolchildren or a healthy living centre. It will be for communities themselves to decide what their needs are –and if they decide to designate their entire allocation to a single organisation for a single project over the full 10-year period that will be their right. The CFN will give the final approval on projects, but initial funding decisions are to be made by local awards panels set up by the local agent and comprising a representative selection of community interests.

NOF is keen to see experimental and innovative projects being supported, but will have little scope to influence what these might be. It is, however, planning, via the CFN, to evaluate what works in the way of long-term capacity-building and to try and gain greater insight into how communities learn. Local agencies will be expected to coordinate and dovetail their pro-grammes to other initiatives on the ground, not least the Community Fund side of the Fair Share scheme, which is also directed to capacity-building, but there is no particular requirement for the two lottery funding streams to operate in tandem on the ground, so practical levels of cooperation will probably vary.

For general information on NOF and Fair Share see www.nof.org.uk/ index.cfm?loc=fairshare&inc=main