East London Groups share in £1.75m+ lottery handout

•There are mixed feelings in hearing that the Big Lottery Fund* has announced that it will be making awards to over 60 projects in London through its Awards For All and Reaching Communities programmes.

On the one hand, this is welcome news for the projects concerned.

•Tower Hamlets Parents Centre will receive nearly £400,000 to run a project to improve the physical and mental health of disadvantaged people from black and minority ethnic communities living in Tower Hamlets. The centre will run activities such as fitness and cookery classes, stop smoking workshops and cervical screening.

•The Care and Learning Foundation in Tower Hamlets is receiving £10,000 to raise awareness of heart conditions and how to help someone who is having a heart attack. St Hilda’s East Community Centre is also receiving £10,000: this is to promote healthy lifestyles for socially isolated Bangladeshi women.

•Over in Hackney, the Community Centre for Refugees from Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia will receive £9,l30 to improve facilities. Homerton Jambo Association will receive a similar sum to “deliver support activities that will focus upon equipping marginalised beneficiaries with employment skills and knowledge regarding enterprise” in order to “create pathways to facilitate the job seeking process”. (We think that means “help people get jobs”.)

•The Hackney CVS is receiving just under £10,000 to create a garage sale service that will support the needs of voluntary organisations raise funds. Also in Hackney, the Wonder Foundation is being given £10,000 to train 30 women in sales, photography and digital skills. The Hackney Bangladeshi Cultural Association has also received £10,000: they will be running English language and life skills classes for local Bangladeshi women.

•Other Hackney groups to benefit include the Goldstar Creative Marketing Group, which will receive £10,000 to fund an employment skills course for disadvantaged young women from the Jewish community, and Odd Eyes Theatre, which will receive £2,343 to deliver peer-led workshops addressing a lack of community cohesion.

•In Barking, the Rasta to Pasta group will receive £10,000 to “deliver a programme of support and recreational activities for BME people who are at risk of engaging in antisocial behaviour and substance misuse.” In Dagenham, a group called Money Wize, with something of a cavalier attitude to the need to improve local literacy, will be using its £10,000 to provide money management workshops to disadvantaged young people.

•In Romford, the Rush Green Community Association will receive £7,360 to refurbish its community centre to comply with health and safety requirements.

•Out in Hornchurch, HASWA has received £8,500 to deliver ethnic style damage classes and workshops aimed at local residents aged 50-60, to improve their health.

You have to congratulate the award-winning groups. Doubtless they have worked very hard to put their funding bids together and they will work just as hard to implement them. However, there are some downsides to the announcement.

•First, the National Lottery collects its funds from individuals who buy lottery tickets. More poor people than rich people buy lottery tickets, and poor people spend proportionately more of their money on lottery tickets than rich people spend. In other words, it’s the opposite of income tax – where you pay in according to your means rather than in proportion to your desire to change your means. It’s a shame the poor have to pay extra to obtain the services they (we) need.

•Second, many of the services funded by this announcement used to be provided in the mainstream public sector. In other words, they were funded more fairly, out of income tax. The workers who delivered services such as these used to be permanent employees paid a stable wage: now the services occur piecemeal, many of them are on fixed contracts, unable to plan for the future as they have no guarantee of income – and possibly no pensions, or entitlement to benefits or legal rights which have a qualifying period.

•Third, the services being delivered by the groups the Lottery is funding are not planned alongside other services. When services were primarily delivered in the public sector, they were mostly handled in one place, which could make sure there was no duplication and provide a single point of contact for the public and could learn lessons fast. It seems very strange that the lottery has to fund cervical screening, for example. This is a service the NHS provides. What is the point of providing a parallel service? The woman’s GP may be – should be – chasing her up to attend the surgery for a smear test. If she goes to another place for a cervical smear, does that place tell the GP? Do they break the news gently, given that the GP surgery may lose funding for not administering the smear itself? In which case, we’re paying for extra bureaucracy. They don’t use that to advertise the lottery, do they? They pay celebrities to encourage us to buy tickets. They don’t put up notices in newsagents to say “please pay for some extra bureaucracy”.

•Fourth, the list of services funded in East London is remarkable for one factor: many of them are aimed at people of a particular national or racial heritage. Quite right too: black and ethnic minority communities and migrant communities often don’t have fair access to mainstream services and this needs to be redressed. Often targeted measures are needed to correct a specific disadvantage. However, a number of these funded services appear to be parallel services, just aimed at a certain BME sector. There is a danger that this approach can leave mainstream services untouched, whereas it could be argued that we should actually put a great deal of stress on changing mainstream services so that all can access them fairly.

Again: well done, those groups who were funded and we hope the services users enjoy the services. The bigger picture, though, is that this overall approach could lead to more people learning how to do funding bids without, overall, much extra by way of services being delivered. And there’s a question mark over whether the taxpayer or the lottery ticket buyer feel that’s a good use of their money.

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*The awards listed above were made through the Big Lottery Fund’s Awards for All and Reaching Communities programmes. Awards for All provides grants between £300 and £10,000 to voluntary and community organisations and Reaching Communities awards larger grants of £10,000 and above for more long term projects.

The Big Lottery Fund gives out out 40% of the money raised by the National Lottery and invest over £650 million a year in projects big and small in health, education, environment and charitable purposes. Since June 2004 it has awarded over £8 billion to projects that make a difference to people and communities in need.

Local projects with ideas on how they could make a difference to their community can find out how to apply for funding from the Big Lottery Fund for projects from as little as £300 to £10,000 by joining a 30 minutes online webinars. They run every week and provide support and guidance on applying. To find out more please visit https://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/englandwebinars

•For more information on funding available visit:
https://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/funding