We are delighted to announce that the Big Lottery fund have announced today that we will receive 5-years of funding following our recent grant application. The funding takes effect from January 2017.
This is fantastic news – although we were aware that we had got through to the final stages of the application process (which has been ongoing for almost 18 months) there was no guarantee that we would be successful.
The main features of the grant are:
- The grant award covers most of the costs of running our Junior and Senior groups and up to 8 holiday groups for each of the five years.
- The funding award is dependent on us continuing to raise parental contributions through subscriptions. To achieve this, weekly group subs (payable termly in advance) will rise by 25 pence per week each January and holiday groups will be £10 each in 2017 increasing by £1 each year.
- A further sum has been awarded, for what the Big Lottery call Building Capabilities, to be used in 2017. We have to arrange an independent organisational strength review of In Touch by next March and then act on any identified actions – this may include additional training for trustees and/or staff.
- Finally, the combination of the grant and parental contributions covers all the main basic running costs of In Touch but we will still need to raise funds each year to cover all the extra things we would like to do such as special visits and activities.
It is fantastic to know that, for the first time in its history, In Touch will have stability for 5 years and we will not have to spend each year worrying whether or not we can keep going for the next year! It gives us all a chance to concentrate on the actual running of the charity rather than the financing of the charity. What fund raising we can do will be entirely for the nice extras that we have always wanted to provide for our children and young people.