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From
the September 2001 Issue
Contents:
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The new joint NOF/CF programme could contain a radical twist. Jane Taylor reports
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NOF’s study skills programme has not quite gone to plan. Jane Taylor reports
MAIN STORY
The new joint NOF/CF programme could contain a radical twist. Jane Taylor reports
A
bold new funding approach to community development could emerge from the
joint New Opportunities Fund/Community Fund programme announced by the
DCMS Secretary of State Tessa Jowell in June. NOF is considering
distributing its £50m contribution to the £150m scheme in the form of
endowments or similar financial scheme that could generate long-term income streams. The funds would probably
be administered through local Community Foundations.
Tessa
Jowell first outlined the joint programme (originally dubbed
‘Communities First’ but now likely to be called ‘Fair Share’) at
the ITALSLottery MonitorENDITAL Annual Conference, describing it as a
way to reach ‘areas which are both deprived and have received less
than their fair share of Lottery money.’ The £150m will be divided
among 50 areas over three years.
The
endowment proposal is still in early draft form: NOF is thought to be
clarifying the legal and taxation complexities. But the initiative would
represent a dramatic shift of approach towards the funding of community
organisations from that pursued by the Community Fund, with its emphasis
on direct grant-making, support for capacity building and hands-on grant
management at local level.
Should
NOF’s board approve this idea at its meeting on September 11, it would
in effect mark the end of the brief
period of ‘joint’ work on the scheme. NOF and CF would
continue to work together on marketing and branding, while pursuing
separate strategies for getting the money out to the selected
localities. NOF would probably limit its £50m to 15 to 20 areas,
leaving the rest to the CF. This would make sense for investment
funding, so that the pot available to each area was big enough to
generate a viable annual fund. Estimates suggest that a £3m pot might
yield an annual sum of £150k.
The Community Fund is consulting internally on its proposed plan for implementation. This is loosely based on the ‘Brass for Barnsley’ initiative and more recent priority area plans. The specific approach to be taken in any locality would, however, depend on pre-existing local resources and community infrastructure – as well as the potential drain on local CF staff time. Senior Community Fund officers are clear that it would be impossible for them to deliver 50 – or even 30 – versions of Brass for Barnsley over the coming three years, particularly against a background of declining income.
Both
distributors are working under the added pressure from the DCMS that
they are to ‘demonstrate early progress’ and fund all 50 areas in
Year 1 (the scheme is scheduled for launch next April), rather than
being able to phase in target areas over the three years. This raises
the possibility that some funds could be awarded at the start of 2002,
ahead of the official programme launch.
Throughout August NOF and CF have been working on the selection of target areas. These will probably be local authority district units (except in Northern Ireland). The modelling is complicated, because as well as taking into account deprivation, the distributors have to map previous Lottery awards, in order to meet Tessa Jowell’s requirement of plugging the gaps in Lottery handouts. Area selection is particularly sensitive for the Community Fund, which already has its own established set of defined local priority areas. The 50 Fair Share areas are likely to be named in early October.
Autumn windfalls for
schools cash?
The
New Opportunities Fund is having to solicit bids from individual local
authorities and allocate extra cash to others in an effort to spend all
the money in its Out of School Hours Learning programme. OSHL was
launched in April 1999 and must allocate its £205m by December 2001.
The programme is closed for applications, but the July meeting of the
NOF Board was asked to approve last-minute “proactive” measures to
try and get the money out by the deadline.
The
particular problem, according to the report presented to the NOF Board,
is a failure to hit spending targets in England; Liverpool and
Lancashire were singled out as two areas where awards were running,
respectively, 69 per cent and 90 per cent short of their notional
allocations of approx £2.7m each. This was offset by bid approvals at
the same board meeting, of £1.2m to Liverpool and £570,000 to
Lancashire. But NOF estimated that even after taking into account the
tranche of approvals in July (the largest single OSHL handout since the
start of the programme), it would be left with £15m still to be
allocated to English regions.
The board agreed a three-pronged approach to clear the remaining funds: topping up the bids of certain applications to be approved in July and September; soliciting bids from specific local education authorities which contained target schools but had not so far applied; and allocating extra lump sums to previously successful applicants covering target schools. NOF is not able to say how it will deal with newly solicited bids, as these would technically come after the closing date, and are unlikely to be submitted as fully developed bids in time for the scheme’s formal cut-off point in December.
A study of the impact of Millennium Commission funding concludes that MC projects have created 6,900 permanent jobs and had significant regeneration effects. The assessment. which the MC commissioned from Gardiner & Theobald and Jura consultants, covers the full six years of MC funding and all three of its programmes: capital projects, festivals and millennium awards.
Desperately seeking
submissions
With
two weeks to go before the closing date for the Community Fund’s
strategic plan consultation, the CF is anxious to hear from more of its
stakeholders. Expressing disappointment at the level of response to
date, CF press officer Robert Blow estimated the number of returned
questionnaires to be ‘in single figures’.
Youth
activities programme launched
A
good half-year ahead of the formal schedule, the New Opportunities Fund
has launched one of its seven third round programmes: Activities for
Young People. The programme
was announced in August, with a £38.75m budget for England for summer
activities aimed mainly at school-leavers, to provide a bridge between
school and employment.
Gambling review
threat to Lottery revenues
A
recommendation to permit betting on National Lottery numbers was among
the conclusions of the Gambling Review Body, chaired by Sir Alan Budd,
when its delayed report was finally published in mid July. The Lottery
operator had hoped its assiduous lobbying campaign might
have persuaded the
review body to omit the ‘side betting’ measure, which Camelot says
caused the Irish lottery to suffer an annual sales
drop of 15% to 22% when it was introduced there.
NOF’s
study skills programme has not quite gone to plan. Jane Taylor reports
The Out of School Hours Learning programme has pioneered many innovative and valuable study skills schemes: breakfast clubs, homework clubs, a huge range of theatre, music, art and dance classes; adventure sports, literacy, numeracy and ICT, mentoring and family learning. Independent research evidence of the direct educational benefits of study skills is starting to mount up. Vanessa Potter, NOF director of policy and external relations, says: ‘This programme is about a mammoth extension of out of school hours activities, especially to motivate and encourage those more at risk of exclusion and low attainment. We are now undertaking longitudinal evaluation work, which we expect will show OSHL to be an invaluable part of the student learning experience.’
Next
month Sport England will launch its second round of sport action zone
bids. Sue Royal talks to the manager of the country’s first SAZ about
how the concept is working in practice
Action
zones are a very new Labour concept. Health and education action zones
are both high-profile initiatives to home in on deprived communities and
tackle some of the fundamentals of social exclusion. Less well known,
but following the same agenda, are sport action zones, launched by Sport
England in February 2000 as long-term strategic interventions. The
first 12 zones have been in development for a year, and in October Sport
England will invite applications for 18 more.
National
Lottery Small Awards Programmes Chart
The entry of the New Opportunities Fund and Wales into Awards for All market another small step on the road to streamlined Lottery application processes. But there remain several more programmes, some aimed at very specific groups, others more widely drawn, which claim to operate small-scale, simplified, relatively fast track application processes. Here we have tried to gather together the programmes and the essential information in a handy at-a-glance guide.
The horseshoe
bat and the horizons of heritage
Jayne Manley, English Nature’s Lottery manager, says it’s time the natural heritage had a higher profile
In
just a few years the Heritage Lottery Fund has made a mark in the world
of nature conservation and the natural heritage. For those unaccustomed to ‘sector speak’, the natural
heritage is our wildlife, our rare and unusual plants and animals, the
rich and varied communities they form and the rocks that shape the
landscape. As part of
HLF’s next strategic planning period, we have all been able to
contribute to the development of HLF’s input to the natural heritage
through a series of workshops and a consultation document The Horizons
of Heritage.
To
fund or not to fund core costs? As the Community Fund reviews its
policy, Alex Klaushofer sums up the state of the debate
The
debate about core costs – whether and how funders should contribute to
the central costs of organisations – has been a running source of
contention for National Lottery fund-seekers in recent years. As the
Community Fund reviews its core costs policy in preparation for its
strategic plan for 2002-2007, this key issue is wide open.
The
Community Fund appears, rightly, upset at the lack of responses to its
strategic consultation exercise, which has been going on over the
summer. I share their concern so I did a quick phone around to find out
why – to pick on one group – Lottery and Community Development
officers had not been banging on the doors of St Vincent House with
their views. The feedback was very predictable. Summer holidays,
pressure of work and the heavy-duty questionnaire were popular reasons
(a couple of folk confessed they had no idea what I was on about). I can
predict there will be a small, last-minute flurry: some among
my sample were definitely intending to hit the deadline. But it
was pointed out to me that this summer there have been three separate
and uncoordinated strategic consultation exercises affecting these council
officials on Lottery matters alone: Heritage, NOF and Community Fund.
Which makes me wonder whether the big-bang approach to consultation is
such a good idea any more. Policy think tanks have done an enormous
amount of work in recent years on novel democratic consultation methods,
some of which have been adopted by central and local government. Perhaps
the distributors ought to pool their knowledge about what works and what
doesn’t in their experience of stakeholder consultation, and then try
out some more adventurous and accessible alternatives to the old Draft
Document Plus Questionnaire approach.
One little democratic initiative that I greatly appreciated was the annual New Opportunities Fund open board meeting, held in July. Admittedly it was a two-part exercise: the public bit and then the private bit. But the public bit was nonetheless frank and interesting, as I hope the news reports on Out of School Hours Learning (page 1 and 4) show. I fear that NOF may take the view that such media reporting is a good reason NOT to hold open meetings. So let me get my defence in first and commend more and more regular openness. I learnt a lot from listening to the discussions and reading the background reports, and almost all of it enhances my view of what NOF is trying to achieve. Assuming NOF doesn’t decide to extend the practice in the meantime, I’d like to urge readers to make an early diary date for next year: July 9th. Hope to see you there.
The all-singing, all-dancing Millennium Awards programme, under which a range of organisations administer awards to individuals, has come up with a brilliant new scheme: cash for crumbly agitation. Help the Aged is running the programme under the more sombre title of Citizens’ Action Millennium Awards, in partnership with the Workers’ Education Association and the National Mentoring Network. Anyone can apply, provided you are over 55 (which leaves a pool of 15 million potential applicants). Projects should be either for skills development, or for local community campaigns (examples given include cleaning up the streets, better use of green spaces, teaching computer skills). The programme has £1.5m to give out, with a maximum of £5,000 to individuals and £10,000 to groups of up to three. The project themes are community safety, local regeneration, environmental improvements and social cohesion. Which covers just about everything. It’s a fantastic idea, which I am telling all my friends and their mums about. To find out more, contact Help the Aged’s Millennium Awards Hotline on 0870 7703280 or e-mail cama@helptheaged.org.uk