What we plan to achieve
The development phase
We’ve committed to a £100 million, 10 year Community Power fund. It’ll give us a better way of working with, and funding, communities to increase community power.
Before launching the broader programme we want to work with partners on a one-year development phase. It’ll run from spring 2025 to spring 2026 and have up to £1.2 million funding. Partners will run activities to improve community power in local communities. And work with us to learn from what’s worked best.
Community Power is one of 3 partnership approaches we opened in January 2025. The others are:
Read about these in our vision for funding in England.
Watch our recorded webinar on YouTube to find out more about the Community Power development phase. The webinar includes a transcript and subtitles.
You can also read a list of frequently asked questions (PDF, 103 KB). These questions are from the webinar and from emails we’ve received.
What community power means
By community power we mean communities being able to influence and change:
- places they live
- services they use
- decisions that affect their lives
By communities we mean people living in the same place, whether at a neighbourhood or larger level.
Development stage: what partners will do
For this first development stage we’re offering funding of £1.2 million. We’ll fund 10 to 15 partner organisations to run new or existing work to improve community power. And we’ll work with all the partners together to learn from what they’ve done. This will shape the longer-term Community Power fund.
We’d like to fund a range of different approaches to improving community power. We’re interested in testing out innovative approaches. But we also want to fund things that already work. We think both are important.
The work we’ll fund could include:
- addressing barriers to community power
- supporting communities to use their power
- improving confidence and accessibility
- supporting communities to influence decisions that affect their lives
- raising awareness of other ways to use community power
- but we’re interested in any approaches that can increase community power
Why we’re doing this
We want to be more than a funder
By this we mean doing more than giving out money. We want to support and involve the communities we fund in other ways too. We’ve committed to this in our strategy.
We want to explore equity-based support for civil society organisations to achieve our missions.
We’ve set out to achieve 4 community-led missions. We’ll support communities to:
- come together – such as enabling people from all backgrounds to shape the future of their communities
- be environmentally sustainable
- help children and young people thrive – like supporting them to shape the decisions that affect them and their communities
- enable people to live healthier lives – such as increasing opportunities for community participation to shape better health services
The work we fund to increase community power will help achieve these missions.
We know we’re not the experts
We think that increasing community power is important in achieving all of our missions. We also know we’re not the experts.
That’s why we want to work with a mix of partners. We’ll share knowledge, enthusiasm and experience. And come up with something better than if any of us did this on our own.