A £200m fund to promote the well-being and personal development of young people has been launched by the Big Lottery Fund. The Young People?s Fund specifically aims to put young people at the centre of creating, planning and delivering projects that will impact on their health, safety, personal development, community involvement and economic well-being.
The Fund will be divided between the four regions of the UK, with England taking £157m. Programmes for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are yet to be announced, but in England the Fund will have five distinct elements, the largest of which is an open access programme worth £77m. Of this, £10m is set aside for individual young people and small groups of young people, with the rest being available for voluntary and community organisations and partnerships between voluntary and statutory organisations. Another element of the Fund, the Positive Activities for Young People programme, will be worth a further £25m and will support young people at risk of social exclusion and community crime to participate in positive activities, including education and the arts, during the school holidays.
Stephen Dunmore, Big Lottery Fund Chief Executive, said ?We are putting young people at the heart of the Young People's Fund. We have consulted widely with a wide range of people ? government departments, voluntary groups and with public agencies ? but more importantly we have asked young people themselves what they want and we also plan to involve them at the decision-making stage.?
However, the consultation period to establish priorities for the Big Lottery Fund, which concluded on September 30, a week after the announcement of the Young People?s Fund, has generated controversy. (ArtsProfessional issue 81, September 6). The three all-encompassing priorities for the distribution of the Big Lottery funds, which were set out in a ?position paper? by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, have been subject to intense criticism by those who believe that the funding constraints implicit in these new priorities will deplete the amount of funding available for charitable activity that does not reflect government priorities.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has now been drawn up between the Big Lottery Fund and the Charity Commission to help ensure that Lottery grants are effectively managed by funded charities. The agreement aims to develop and share best practice and to support the charitable sector where charities have Big Lottery Fund grants.
Simon Gillespie, Director of Operations at the Charity Commission, said, ?There is actually very little abuse within the charity sector, especially when you think of its size, but we want to crack down hard on it when it does occur.
Details of the Young People?s Fund can be found at w: http://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk; t: 0845 410 2030