DCMS Know Your Neighbourhood Fund

DCMS Know Your Neighbourhood Fund is a multi-year funding programme in Hull (and eight other areas of the UK) that will run until the end of March 2025. The programme is committed to giving people the opportunity to flourish and improve their wellbeing and their pride in place with the overall aims to encourage people to take part in volunteering and to reduce loneliness and social isolation.

The grant priorities are to:

  • Support meaningful and impactful volunteering
  • Help people to connect with others in their local area, reducing loneliness.
  • Increase volunteer engagement
  • Engage people who are not currently participating in activities

The Know Your Neighbourhood Fund is fundamentally about learning. This means that the evaluation aspect of the funding is key.  So, any group applying for funding must be aware that a key objective of the fund is building the evidence base around the following DCMS objectives.

  • To build the evidence to identify scalable and sustainable place-based interventions that work in increasing regular volunteering and reducing chronic loneliness.
  • To increase the proportion of people who volunteer at least once a month.
  • To reduce the proportion of chronically lonely people who lack desired level of social connections.
  • To enable the local voluntary and community sectors to implement sustainable systems and processes that encourage volunteering and tackle loneliness.

To enable this learning, there will be a local evaluator connected to successful projects to carry out evaluation tasks, and there are several tasks that groups will be required to take on as part of the grant agreement. Sufficient time and resource needs to be factored into any application and project plan, and ensuring all questions on the application form are answered is important. There will be questions in the application form that are different to our usual questions that focus on the evaluation.

Two Ridings has held a number of workshops in Hull over the last two months to establish where the gaps are in the city and what opportunities there are to really have a city-wide benefit in the volunteering landscape and in addressing loneliness and social isolation. To that end some groups are collaborating so that they can put in partnerships bids for funding. The most recent workshop session is summarised in this presentation DCMS Know Your Neighbourhood presentation.

To help answer some of your questions around the evaluation side of the fund please see the Evaluation Document for Know Your Neighbourhood Fund Applicants

Below is the Know Your Neighbourhood Evaluation Webinar held recently for prospective applicants

If you have questions on this fund, contact [email protected] 

Size of grants

You can apply for the following amounts:

  • Small Grants of between £10,000 and £20,000
  • Medium Grants of between £30,000 and £50,000
  • Large Grants of up to £150,000
Please note DCMS recommend that overheads are around 6% of overall project costs.

Please read the full fund page and all attachments to understand the collaborative, learning and evaluation aspect of the fund.

Who can apply?

The Know Your Neighbourhood Fund is open to:

  • Registered charities
  • Constituted community groups
  • Other charitable organisations including Social Enterprises and CICs limited by guarantee in England

For the above organisations, you must have a minimum of three unrelated committee members and have a registered bank account.

  • National organisations with local branches (with their own management committee and bank account).
  • New organisations that can demonstrate they are financially robust.
  • Non-constituted groups or collectives

Non-constituted groups or collectives should apply in partnership with an eligible organisation. The eligible organisation must be part of delivering the project. The eligible organisation must manage the grant.

Our full criteria can be found here: https://www.tworidingscf.org.uk/how-to-apply/

How to apply?

Before applying, please read the DCMS Know Your Neighbourhood Fund Guidance Notes – Round 2  carefully. Then fill in the Application Form and attach your supporting documents.

When to apply?

You can apply now. The closing date is Tuesday 30th May 2023.

Areas covered