Date: May 2014

London borough: London-wide

Here we share London Play’s successful application for funding from the Big Lottery. As public budgets continue to shrink, the competition for grant funding intensifies – and more and more organisations are competing for less money.

Everyone is looking for ways to make their funding applications stand out above the rest. In the play sector the challenge is perhaps even more acute – as we struggle to challenge the perception of play (among some budget holders) as a luxury rather than the need and right that we know it to be. So what does a successful fundraising application look like? Well, we hope we can help a bit with that….

We have recently had our application to the Big Lottery’s Reaching Communities programme, to deliver the London Play Streets Project, approved (hooray!) Given that part of our purpose is to improve play opportunities for London’s children by supporting play providers – in whichever form they take – we thought it might be helpful to share the secret to our success.

So we asked the good people at Reaching Communities – who are thankfully truly enlightened when it comes to understanding the value of play – if we could publish our successful application in order that play providers across the capital can learn and borrow from it as they wish.

We’ve had to obscure a few bits of the bid to comply with data protection and privacy rules but otherwise, here it is in all its glory. Download below – please try to ignore the blood, sweat and tear stains and focus on the content!