Putting Communities First: Our impact report
In October 2021, we published Our Commitment to Communities and said that we would use data and evidence to inform our strategy. We also committed to measuring, understanding and sharing what works, why, and where the challenges and opportunities lie.
Our first ever comprehensive Impact Report, Putting Communities First, is an important step in this journey.
It tells a powerful story of the reach, scale and contribution of the £3.4 billion we have awarded over the last five years, including our dedicated coronavirus crisis funding in 2020.
The report demonstrates how over 72,000 charities and community organisations support people and communities across the UK to be resilient, thrive, and prosper.
For the first time we look across all our funding and describe its impact and what it enables for our grant holders, and the people and communities they work with.
The results are remarkable; revealing the vital role that grassroots community activity has in generating local social capital and building critical social infrastructure.
We also focus on six key areas that are priorities in our funding: supporting thriving communities; giving opportunity to young people; promoting employment and employability; helping those most in need in our society; the climate and net zero challenge; and our dedicated crisis funding during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Putting Communities First: Our impact report, 2016-17 to 2020-21 shares our findings in full.
- Shorter executive summaries share digestible key headlines in English and Welsh:
- The full findings from research carried out with our grant holders are also available:
- You can also read case studies from 14 grant holders across the UK.
Headline findings
Each year our funding recruits 4,700 full time equivalent staff and mobilises 290,000 volunteers - 80,000 of these are new to the organisation.
Small grant holders (who receive £10,000 or less) mobilise half (over 145,000) of volunteers.
In a typical year grant holders collectively support around 5.2 million people, with small grant holders reaching two-thirds (3.1 million) of all beneficiaries.
97% of grant holders report positive benefits for people, like improved wellbeing, more social contact, and better confidence and self-esteem.
92% report community benefits, like better connected services, opportunities to mix with others and more local events and activities.
42% of grant holders say that people have more local pride and belonging because of the services or activities we fund them to deliver.
Over five years, £650 million has supported community infrastructure, like village halls, parks and community centres.
Every month, around 1.8 million people use National Lottery Community Fund supported community venues.
Grant holders that target their activities to children and young people help improve confidence, self-esteem, and wellbeing; build stronger friendships and relationships; give young people more places to go and things to do and enable volunteering and social action.
Grant holders that improve peoples’ employment situation do this by supporting people to develop skills for the workplace; start looking for a job, take up education and training, improve their job-hunting skills and move into sustained employment (of six months or more).
Projects that target people with complex needs make a real difference to people’s lives. 91% report improvements in participants’ mental health and 68% help improve physical health and wellbeing.
16% of all grant holders tell us they offer environmental activities, including conservation, food growing, energy generation or reuse and recycling.
Our research shows that these grants are more likely than average to contribute to community benefits like increased local pride and belonging.
Without our dedicated coronavirus crisis funding in England, 56% of grant holders would have delivered significantly fewer services and nearly one in five (17%) would have had to close or stop providing services altogether.
19% of grant holders used their grant to bring back or prevent staff going on furlough.