£100m funding offers a BIG opportunity for community enterprises

The BIG Lottery fund today announced changes to its flagship funding programme - Reaching Communities - which will likely be good news for social enterprises.

Reaching Communities is open to any social enterprise in England with an idea about how to improve their community, and funding of as much as £500,000 for up to five years is available.

Speaking in London at the annual Action Planning-run third sector funding conference Funding the Future, BIG CEO Peter Wanless announced a commitment from the lottery of £100m a year in Reaching Communities through to 2015.

But he added that from the spring, Reaching Communities would be divided into Reaching Communities 'full fat' and Reaching Communities 'light'.

'We wanted to keep the hugely popular Reaching Communities but also offer a slimmer, light, version for those organisations wanting up to £40,000 a year for up to five years,' said Wanless.

'Reaching Communities light will be an intermediary programme without the full rigmarole of accessing Reaching Communities full fat.'

BIG will also introduced a two-stage process for 'Reaching Communities full fat' that means organisations will get a quicker 'no' decision.

Walness told the third sector audience this would mean fewer organisations going through the full application process 'which costs you a lot of time and money and costs us a lot of money to administer'.

From the autumn Reaching Communities will also have a dedicated programme for capital programmes like the refurbishment of community buildings.

The changes are a response to the fund's BIG Thinking consultation last year. Over 75 per cent of respondents said that it was better to give early decisions on applications - even if that was a rejection.