Community Asset Fund now open

Our new funding programme is here to breathe life into the spaces and places in your community.

Find out more about our Community Asset Fund and apply now

It might be the park you run through. The village hall you visit for a fitness class. Or maybe the pitch you play on. A welcoming, accessible space has the potential to attract a range of people to get active. And that’s a key part of our strategy. You might call it the backbone of what we do. If the places aren’t up to scratch­­, no amount of persuasion will stop people losing interest.

That’s because the quality of the facility is often a big factor in how people feel about sport and fitness. And it plays a huge role in how likely they are to come back and repeat the activity.

But there’s no single, magic formula. Things that work vary from community to community. It depends on so many factors – such as how affluent a region is or how near it is to a big city.

We really want to hear from all kinds of sports clubs, community organisations and social enterprises that have a great idea that’ll get people moving.

A new, bold vision

Applying for funding is now going to be easier than ever before.

We don’t want you to have to jump through hoops or provide more details about your great idea than necessary, especially in the first instance. We just need to know enough information so that we can make a decision and work with you to develop your idea.

We’ve also produced a new online application form that’s been built with you in mind. We want to make applying as easy and accessible as possible.

Our Community Asset Fund is an open, rolling programme and marks a change from the way we’ve previously done funding, including:

• Open all the time. There will be no deadlines, so you can apply whenever your project or idea is ready
• Regular and quick decision-making. We will commit to making regular decisions as soon as possible on all applications
• Short and simple application. We don’t want you to spend a lot of time or incur costs if we can’t support you – but we also want to know enough to make a good decision
• No supporting information initially. We will only ask for supporting information when we have made an in-principle decision after the assessment of your application
• It’s just about your project. The information we will ask for is the information you know – the details of your organisation, your project and the community and people you work with
• More flexibility. We want to be able to treat each project and organisation on an individual basis and ensure information we request or the approach we take is reasonable and proportionate
• More developmental. Depending on the nature of what you want to do, we will support and help projects where we can
• Continuous improvement. We want to continuously learn about how our investment makes a difference, so will seek your feedback and make changes as appropriate.