National Lottery Charities Board Northern Ireland

Strategic Priorities in Northern Ireland - A Word from our Director

Many organisations within the voluntary and community sector will not be surprised to learn that the Charities Board in Northern Ireland is facing considerable pressures on our grant-making budget. Requests for funding in the current year are likely to be in the region of �85m and applications continue to increase. With a falling budget, we clearly will not be able to assist as many projects as we have in previous years. Inevitably we will be unable to assist a very significant number of projects due to 'lack of funding'.

As outlined in the current Strategic Plan, 1999 - 2002, the National Lottery Charities Board in Northern Ireland has a number of priority areas. These priority areas are; older people, minority ethnic communities, families and children, young people, people living in rural areas. Since then 'people with disabilities' has been added.

In addition to assessing the overall quality of a project, we will also continue to consider whether or not the project meets one or more of these key priority areas. Given the high number of applications and the consequent pressures on our grants budget, we will be focusing more tightly on the degree to which applications meet these priorities.

Therefore, it is likely that, for the foreseeable future, the Northern Ireland Committee will normally want to fund projects which clearly meet the above priorities, unless a strong exceptional case is made to fund a project which falls outside these priority areas.

Larger requests for funding in excess of �250,000 are also less likely to succeed due to the reducing budget and groups are asked to closely scrutinise their budget request before presenting it to the Charities Board.

On a brighter note, our small grants programme is not currently experiencing the same budget pressures and we are keen to welcome good applications under this programme.

Although this programme has the same priority areas as the main grants programme it has, at present, the ability to fund outside of priority areas where the application meets all of the other funding criteria.

One out of every two applications received is successful in their bid for a small grants. Groups reqesting a small grants will also benefit from much quicker decision times that the main grants programme. A decision to award a small grant will take no more than there months from receipt of a completed application form.