Healthy Communities Together

This fund is closed 

We're no longer accepting applications for this fund. This page provides a summary of the funding.

Fund aims

Healthy Communities Together comprises a £3 million investment from The National Lottery Community Fund and up to £850k worth of leadership development and learning support from The King’s Fund to place-based partnerships.

The fund aims to:

• support local areas to develop effective and sustainable partnership working between the voluntary and community sector, NHS and local authorities to improve the health and wellbeing of local communities
• support the development of relationships between partners, identifying and agreeing how best to work together, to ensure the involvement of organisations working across communities, and create a plan of activities

Launched in January 2020, the programme consists of 2 phases. Phase 1 (started in early 2021) where 6 areas received £50,000 funding for up to 9 months from The National Lottery Community Fund to develop their partnerships and project plans and, a package of dedicated learning and development support from The King’s Fund.

At the end of this phase, each site was invited to apply for phase 2 of the fund for further funding and support. The 5 successful partnerships received up to £450,000 in funding, as well as ongoing learning and development support from The King’s Fund, over a further 3 years.

Health Equalities Grantees

During the initial application process for Healthy Communities Together, The National Lottery Community Fund received a large number of applications and realised how important and timely this work was as a result of:

• deep health inequalities exposed by the pandemic
• an increase in joint, cross-sector working necessitated by COVID-19 with many making significant progress with new relationships and conversations taking place across systems and partnerships forming
• the increased value of the VCS with its extensive reach into communities and large volunteer base being seen as part of the recovery response and solution
• changes in the health system (e.g. move to Integrated Care Systems, social prescribing) benefiting from cross partnership working

As a result, The National Lottery Community Fund decided to provide funding and support to an additional 14 place-based partnerships with a focus on addressing health inequalities. This second cohort, known as the Health Equalities Grantees, received £50,000 development funding for phase 1 of the programme.

Following completion of the development phase, 12 partnerships were successful and received up to £450,000 of funding. To support this cohort, Innovation Unit was successfully commissioned to provide learning and support to partnerships. The National Lottery Community Fund and the Innovation Unit have been working together to:

• support the organisations and grant holders who are looking to address health inequalities in their local areas
• connect and convene the Health Equality partnerships to generate and share learning
• communicate this learning to wider audience