The consultation on the Empowerment Fund - the £7.5m pot to be doled out by the Government in support of the Empowerment White Paper’s aims - has been published.

The contents aren’t good news for small, community organisations - at least, not directly. To bid for the fund at all organisations have to demonstrate a turnover of £250,000 per annum, and to bid for the maximum amount you need an income of £400,000 p.a.

There are participation initiatives here in Brighton that don’t clear £2.50 a year, let alone £250,000.

This big-solutions big-bucks approach is disappointing not just because we at the Society don’t turn over a quarter of a million pounds a year, though we’d like to. It’s more that big, hulking organisations with big chunks of funding tend to produce big, expensive solutions that have only limited appeal, and are hard to adapt to local circumstances. I’d much rather have had 1,000 projects each funded with £7,500.

I suppose smaller groups will need to look to the more ground-level CommunityBuilders fund, on which we await details, and the Office of the Third Sector’s Grassroots Grants.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Consultations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.