Project Director: Peter Wells
Project Duration: 2010-2011
Many of the Big Lottery Fund's programmes have focused on providing capital funding – that is, funding for new or refurbished buildings or to buy or improve land, among other purposes.
In most cases, this is only the first step in a wider process of improvement and benefits. The building or land offers a site for projects to run or a facility for communities to enjoy. Groups running the facility will have to find funds and resources to run those services and to maintain the building or land.
The Big Lottery Fund wanted to know how effective its funding for capital projects had been in kick-starting supporting those improvements into the future, and to find out what we could do in future to help ensure that those benefits are achieved and will last. So in 2010 it commissioned the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR) at Sheffield Hallam University to investigate those questions.
The main findings include the following:
- Groups need a whole range of skills to run capital projects, and then to set up and run services. The type and level of skills varies between projects and over time.
- It is essential to find ways to cover future running costs if benefits are to last. This may seem obvious, but this matter has to be considered from the earliest phases of the capital project.
- Projects that involve the community are more likely to be sustained.
- Groups need to be flexible enough to adapt to changes in policy, community needs and funding available.
- Many projects felt that they would never have been able to go ahead without BIG’s support, and that the way we fund had often allowed them to provide facilities of a higher standard – which had in turn led to higher levels of community involvement and pride.
The project team also included Tracey Chadwick-Coule (Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University) and John Trinnaman (mtl Consultants).
