Funding news for community buildings

Our funding sources list

Take a look at our funding list for community buildings for information about grant schemes and funding ideas. You can download the list free of charge from our website.

If you’re not very confident with completing grant applications, why not book a place on one of our training sessions?

There’s also a wealth of guidance online to help with planning and completing grant applications, and then showing the impact of your work. You could start by looking at these resources from the National Lottery Community Fund.

Particularly for buildings in villages and small towns

If you’re planning a major refurbishment or extension project then make sure you’ve checked whether you’re eligible for the Village Hall Improvement Grant Fund. You can apply for up to £75,000, to a maximum of 20% of the total project cost – as recompense for the VAT that is added on to most building works on community halls.

Read the guidance notes (direct link here) for the full details, but note in particular that you can only apply if:

• Your building is in a town or village of under 10,000 population
• Your organisation is charitable (local authorities are not eligible)
• Your organisation is not registered for VAT

Also for rural areas, you might find it useful to sign up for the monthly Rural Funding Digest which is produced by the Rural Services Network. Their August bulletin is here – and see the green box on the right of the page where you can sign up to receive future bulletins.

If you’re active in urban south Hampshire

For organisations that work in and around Portsmouth / Southampton, on the Isle of Wight, or anywhere along the Dorset coast, look at the small grants available through our Communities Against Cancer programme. These funds are to raise awareness of cancer prevention and detection among people whose cancer-related health outcomes are worse than average. See the link above for all the details.

For ideas of a more enterprising nature

Community Business Bright Ideas Fund – grants of up to £15,000 ‘to give community groups in England the support necessary to start setting up their community business’ for ‘development and start-up costs’. It talks about setting up organisations but the football case study at the bottom of the page suggests older organisations can apply if they are unincorporated (like charitable trusts / associations) or if they have only been a corporate body (like a charitable company, CIO, or CIC) for less than 5 years. The deadline for applications is 30 September.

Community Business Fund – grants of £50,000 to £300,000 ‘to support existing community businesses to become more financially sustainable’. This fund is similar to the Bright Ideas Fund above but is much larger and is only open to organisations that are already incorporated. Their guidance notes explain this and address other questions around applying. It’s open from 11 September to 9 October and you’ll see at the link above that they are looking for applications from our region. If you can, join in with the online ‘webinar’ on 12 September.

If you’re not sure what the term community business means then take a look here – it can include charitable community associations and halls because hiring out space counts as trading.