Each year The Movement Fund invests over £20 million of National Lottery and government money to help people play sport and take part in physical activity.
As we receive more applications than we can fund, we have to decide which projects to prioritise.
How we prioritise
Our main focus is to support projects that match our goal of getting more people active, reducing the number of inactive people and tackling long-standing inequalities.
This means our investment supports the goals of our Uniting the Movement strategy.
We especially want to support projects that give opportunities to groups of people who typically haven't had as many chances to be active.
These groups include:
- people living on low incomes
- disabled people or those with long-term health conditions
- older people
- people from culturally diverse communities
- pregnant women and parents with very young children
- girls aged 5-16
- LGBTQ+ people
- people who are in foster care
- people who provide care without pay.
We're particularly interested in projects that address these combined hurdles, such as people with long-term health conditions alongside caring responsibilities.
To help recognise the intersectionality of individuals' characteristics that impact their activity levels, we've created the Inequalities Metric.
We also give priority to projects in communities where there's a greater need.
To help with this, we use our Place Needs Classification (PNC) – this combines physical activity data from our Active Lives Surveys, as well as wider social data including the index of multiple deprivation (IMD), community need and health inequalities data, to help us understand the needs of an area.
The Movement Fund does support projects that don’t directly meet these priorities. But we’ll prioritise the project that best matches these priorities.