Building capacity: Fair Share Trust
In late 2003, the Scottish Community Foundation began working with people in thirteen communities in Scotland to channel over £6M from the Big Lottery Fund Fair Share Trust into local projects that would make a lasting difference.
The emphasis wasn’t on leaving behind a physical legacy of buildings or facilities – although some have been built along the way. Instead, the focus was on making a difference to local people and local organisations, and growing the connections and networks between them.
The thirteen neighbourhoods selected to benefit from the Fair Share Trust were chosen because they’d not accessed their ‘fair share’ of lottery money before. The intention was not just to inject some lottery money into those areas, but to lead to more opportunities for local projects to successfully apply for funding in future. Key to this approach was the involvement of local panels – a group of people in each community who knew the neighbourhood, appreciated its strengths and understood its challenges. Over seven years, and with support from the Scottish Community Foundation, they’ve used the Fair Share Trust money to grow their ideas for making a difference into sustainable local initiatives.
Click the links below to download two publications about the Fair Share Trust in Scotland:
Trust in your future: A summary report telling the story of the Fair Share Trust in Scotland; and Fair Enough… lessons from the Fair Share Trust in Scotland, which aims to summarise lessons learned from the programme and draw out their relevance for communities, funders and policy makers in Scotland today.
A list of grants awarded from the programme can be accessed from our grant-making map.
Visit www.fairsharetrust.org.uk for more information about the Fair Share Trust in the UK.