Below are the changes made by Big Lottery for their small grant scheme in Wales:

1. The size of grant has widened. You can now apply for a grant between £300 and £10,000 for a project lasting around a year.
2. We are less prescriptive on what we can and can’t fund. For instance you can now apply for staff salaries and feasibility studies.
3. We have simplified our guidance focusing on what we are looking for. Rather than asking what’s the matter with communities, we want you to tell us how you have involved the community in the design, development and delivery of planned activities.
4. We will assess your application against our funding priorities, your project will need to show how it will:

• bring people together and build strong relationships in and across communities
• improve the places and spaces that matter to communities
• enable more people to fulfil their potential by working to address issues at the earliest possible stage.

5. We are keen to support smaller organisations. To achieve this, we’ll take your organisation’s income into consideration as part of our overall decision.
6. End of grant reports for everyone are a thing of the past. For our small grants we want you to focus on the delivery of activities and as such we will ask a sample to submit a progress report. Of course you may want to shout about your project and we will still be on hand to offer support.
7. Our branding makes reference to the National Lottery, without which our programme could not operate. A big thank you to National Lottery players for making this possible!