A moment of reflection – one year into our corporate plan
This time last year we published our corporate plan to outline how we are going to deliver our ambitious strategy. Now, 12 months on from the largest expansion in our funding for three decades, it’s an ideal time to reflect on what we’ve already achieved and where we’re focusing our efforts further to deliver bold change for communities.
There is no doubt that we are facing challenges as a society and pressures are being felt deeply for many, but I truly believe that empowering communities and future generations is the key to dealing with these major changes we face. Social connections and community activities are at the heart of creating a healthier, happier and more equitable society. In the first year of our plan, we awarded £724 million to 13,000 projects—that’s eight grants every hour.
We’ve also made significant progress towards our ambitious three-year targets: we are on track to reach 80% of areas across the UK; to see over 50% of grants go to communities experiencing the greatest poverty and disadvantage; and to focus 90% of grants on our four community-led missions.
As we move into the second year of our corporate plan and continue to deepen and develop relationships with a new National Lottery Operator and new UK Government, our focus on our four community missions and our ambition remains clear. Our refreshed funding programmes across England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and UK-wide will put our community-led missions at the forefront.
We receive an idea every three minutes and fund a community project every eight minutes, so our mission-led approach has really helped us in the last year to focus our efforts.
Over the last 12 months, 95% of grants made focused on one of our community-led missions: supporting communities to come together, be environmentally sustainable, help children and young people thrive and enable people to live healthier lives. Our missions framework drills down further into these areas and the outcomes and target groups we are aiming to reach. This will help us as we work to fully align our funding programmes to our missions in the years to come.
The Menopause Alliance in England is a great example of supporting those groups tackling health inequalities. With National Lottery funding they are providing vital menopause and midlife peer support for local women. The project provides a support group for women from a range of diverse backgrounds, a safe space where women can comfortably speak about the effects of menopause.
This focused approach to funding in our mission areas, is helping our dedicated teams to deliver highly impactful grant-making, by giving us a clear direction of travel.
We also pledged to extend grassroots funding across the UK and I’m pleased to say 84% of our funding was distributed through small grants and 82% of grants were to organisations with an income of less than £1 million.
We know our small grants are the most effective way to get to the heart of the day-to-day issues facing communities. In Northern Ireland, Pets As Therapy is a fantastic example of this, using their small grant to bring volunteers and their pets into care homes and hospices, improving the health and wellbeing of vulnerable people in local communities.
Tackling inequality and taking an equity-based approach is at the core of what we do, and this last year has seen us truly bringing this to life. 47% of our grants were awarded to the 30% of areas in each UK nation experiencing the highest levels of deprivation.
In the last year, we awarded £2.1 million on average every day to projects to do extraordinary things to improve their lives and communities. This year will see visible steps forward in this equity-based approach and our commitment on environmental action – two areas of major focus for us.
The scale and speed of the climate crisis, in particular, means we need to supercharge our environmental funding, so we are making plans for the years ahead to increase our support for environmental projects. We have already exceeded our initial Climate Action Fund commitment of £100 million in the first five years of the 10-year programme, and we’ve invested almost £50 million into environmental projects across the UK in 2024-25.
A project which has benefitted from our Climate Action Fund is Changeworks in Scotland, receiving almost £1.5 million to work with communities to support the decarbonisation of homes and empower communities to work towards a greener future. Last year, the project provided 64,000 households with energy saving advice, supporting rural areas suffering from fuel poverty.
To excel in how we support communities going forwards, we will prioritise delivering our people and culture strategy and new digital strategy – embracing technology that simplifies, reimagines and improves the experience of our funding.
Earlier this year, we shared our AI Principles, alongside guidance on using AI for funding applications to improve both accessibility and efficiency for organisations applying to us. We are also proud to be a partner on a new AI Charity taskforce — a coalition of funders, charities, and other partners dedicated to ensuring AI works for civil society. Coming together to collaborate across the sector to ensure AI works for everyone and not just the few, isn't just a choice - it's a moral imperative and we are committed to working alongside communities to make the biggest possible difference.
We will continue to support communities where it’s needed most and give them more of a say as we work to distribute £4 billion of lifechanging funds by 2030. We’ll deepen our partnership efforts and mark moments through the year that matter for communities.
As we begin the second year of our corporate plan, I look forward to pushing ahead with our goals, harnessing innovation, amplifying grassroots efforts, and championing bold, community-led solutions.