The National Lottery Community Fund is the largest community funder in the UK with the purpose of awarding funding that strengthens society and improves lives across the UK.
The Fund has a commitment to being an environmentally regenerative funder and, to ensure this commitment is met, requires an understanding of the environmental impact of its grantmaking.
As a first step towards developing this understanding, the National Lottery Community Fund commissioned CAG to do some research. This involved a desk review to look at whether and how other funders are looking at this issue, plus a desk review of 60 projects, selected to be broadly representative of those supported by the Fund. We then did some initial work to develop project archetypes with an assessment of the likely impact of each. You can read about our approach in this summary report:
“We gave CAG a very tight timeframe of just 6 weeks to carry out this work and we were very impressed with the depth and coverage of their work. We’ve shared the report internally and are reflecting on the findings; working with our innovation unit we will use it to generate a fuller response to our ‘environmentally regenerative funder’ ambition”. Nick Gardner, Head of Climate Action, the National Lottery Community Fund