Community Ownership Fund: prospectus
17 December 2021 at 09:49:17
The Community Ownership Fund bidding prospectus provides detailed guidance on the purpose of the fund, eligibility criteria, funding and support assessment criteria and the decision-making process. Please see below for update on round 2.
Change made:
Details of new round 2 start date and reopening of round 1
added.
The government is providing £150 million over 4 years to support community groups in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to take ownership of assets and amenities at risk of being lost.
Voluntary and community groups can bid for match funding to acquire important assets and run them for the benefit of the local community.
The Fund will run until 2024/25 and there will be at least 8 bidding rounds in total. This prospectus contains details for round 1.
You can apply for the fund by using this application form.
In order to fully examine, learn and implement the lessons of
the first pilot bidding round of the Community Ownership Fund, the
Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities will be
pushing back the start date for the second round to spring 2022.
This will enable us to ensure that the Community Ownership Fund is
able to effectively invest in communities across the United Kingdom
and that communities have more time to submit successful
applications to the fund.
We will be launching an updated prospectus, assessment guidance
and application form in spring 2022. Alongside this we will also be
offering additional support to interested groups to help as many
projects as possible to benefit from the fund.
In the meantime, we understand that some community groups who were
unsuccessful in round 1 will be seeking to reapply for funding due
to urgent time constraints related to saving their community asset.
We will therefore be reopening round 1 only for those applicants
whose bids were eligible but were not funded in the first bidding
round on 6 December 2021 and closing in February 2022. The
assessment criteria and prospectus will remain the same as round 1,
and we are therefore only looking for markedly improved bids to
reapply, otherwise projects will not meet the requirements for
funding.
