Council budgets are agreed well in advance of each financial year, and you will be able to plan some years ahead, in discussion with your line-manager, who will know what forward projections are in place for the department you work in. Departmental budgets are agreed with the Portfolio holder who will argue that the work your department does in crucial in meeting Council aims; the officer who heads the department will allocate funds between the different services. He or she will need to show how those funds have been used at the end of the year, and overall the department has operated within budget. The Head of your Service will look to you for accurate information.

It is important that you keep control over your funds, and think ahead. Remember that you will have planned for projects later in the year, and may need to keep reserves available. The arts do not tend to expend funds on a regular monthly basis, as some departments will; your expenditure will be defined by the progress of the projects you choose to support.

Your authority may have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with arts clients, which are an agreement to fund the organisation over an agreed number of years (as long as funds are available). They will have details of the broad range of activities, for which your authority are providing funds, and may detail specific targets for the use of the authority’s funds. These may be written in collaboration with the regional ACE office, and with other Local Authorities, if they are contributing partners in the SLA. These are subject to an annual review with all partners, and you may be representing your Authority at those meetings.

Council budget teams will provide your Department Head with up-to-date information, although in practice this may be some months behind your programmes. You may need to explain variations between your plans and centrally produced records.


B.11 External fundraising sources

We all know that Local Authority budgets are under increasing pressure, so you may need to access external funds to do the work you want to do. If you can engineer a partnership with other Council departments, or with local groups, that can unlock funds. In many cases, fundraising can benefit from partnership with community groups, and you may want to consider whether your Council is best placed to make some applications. The Arts Council has a useful information sheet on Other sources of funding within the publications pages of its site. It is also worth seeing if your authority has an external funding unit or subscribes to funding digests and websites so that you can tap into these.

You may also find that internal e-newsletters are distributed in your authority, which relate to external funding sources, such as new opportunities from Government, trust, European or other sources. It is worth signing up for these, as it’s a lot quicker than having to do your own research all the time! A good place to start is to subscribe to www.governmentfunding.org.uk. 

Largely, there are a number of ways to address raising additional funds, external to local authorities. For example:

Courtesy: Buxon Festival

1. Private sector
Local businesses can support local arts projects, but will plan their sponsorship commitments some way ahead, and may not have large funds to commit. You should discuss with your regional office of Arts and Business, before starting a campaign.

2. Artform support agencies
There are agencies whose role is to develop participation in some artforms – for a music project, for example, you may be within the scope of a Youth Music region, or linked to your regional Orchestral Board subscription if you have one.

3. Arts sector
Arts Council England runs a single grants programme called Grants for the Arts, which is explained on the www.artscouncil.org.uk site. This is a competitive system, and you will need to show how your project meets the scheme’s priorities. You should discuss with an ACE officer before applying (see chapter 3). However, the Arts Council is keen to work in partnership with local councils, in ways that meet local needs, through arts programmes.

4. Private trusts
Some trusts are open to constituted community groups only, some only to registered charities. If you are researching this area, check carefully whether your project meets trust aims and priorities, and the timescale for decision-making.

5. Regeneration funds
This may include a range of rural and urban initiatives which may be appropriate to arts projects – they may be focused on improving services in health, skills, environment, employability, or other Government, regional or European priorities, but innovative arts programmes often meet these, in partnership with local agencies.
 
Many local authorities circulate information on external regeneration funding opportunities, which may be available through Government schemes, or through the EU. There may be officers in the authority with experience of accessing these, and you should discuss your programme with them and your line manager, before proceeding.

6. National Lottery

National Lottery good cause

• Arts– see above
• Sport: Will support dance projects
• Heritage (via the Heritage Lottery Fund as distinct from English Heritage)
• BIG Lottery Fund (that has inherited the briefs of both the Community Fund and New Opportunities Fund, which merged with the Millennium fund into the largest of all the Lottery funds).
• NESTA - the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, is
  working to increase the UK’s capacity for innovation

In addition, Awards for All is a joint Lottery programme that helps small community groups and organizations. It is funded by the main four Lottery distributors listed above and enables people to take part in arts, sports or heritage related activities as well as educational, environmental and health projects. Awards for All is administered by the Big Lottery Fund.

Grants available from these funds range from under £500 to over £1 million. The complexity of application processes and evidence required varies according to the individual fund and the amount of money applied for. Similarly the turnaround on funding decisions can range from six weeks to nearly as many years depending on the complexity of the project.

A level of match or partnership funding, between 10–50%, will be required in almost every case when applying to the above funds.

Conditions and criteria for funding obviously vary between the distributors but most can be found, together with application forms to download or complete online at the respective websites of each funder.

As always a telephone conversation with a relevant officer and a minimum amount of research into conditions and criteria is advisable before putting pen to paper.  

Heritage:
The Heritage Lottery Fund (www.hlf.org.uk) allocates both capital (buildings and equipment) and activity/programme funding for projects that help it to achieve its aims, which are to encourage people to participate in and learn about their culture and to conserve and enhance the UK’s heritage.

In this instance the word heritage is applied to many different things that have been and can be passed from one generation to another. These include the countryside, parks and gardens, industrial and maritime sites, historic records (like photographs, diaries and reminiscences) and cultural and local traditions.
Applications for grants under £2 million are made at regional level.

Big Lottery Fund
Launched in 2004, Big Lottery (www.biglotteryfund.org.uk) combines the functions of the New Opportunities and Community Funds together with the funding of large-scale regeneration projects, previously the responsibility of the Millennium Commission. This means it will be the most appropriate fund for projects originating from the charitable, voluntary, health, education and regeneration sectors. As such Big Lottery controls 50% of total lottery proceeds allocated to good causes, which equates to an anticipated £600-700 million a year.

Priorities will continue to focus on improving the quality of life for disadvantaged groups with programmes likely to address the needs of young people, voluntary and community groups, regeneration projects, green spaces and health.

Awards for All
Awards for All (www.awardsforall.org.uk) is the simplest and, possibly, the most versatile of all the lottery funding programmes. The application procedure is easy with a simple to fill in form available on line and a maximum turnaround of eight weeks on all decisions.

The programme is aimed at and is open to local community projects that enable people to take part in arts, sports or heritage related activities as well as projects that promote education, the environment and health in the local community.

Awards for All has a ceiling of £10,000. Strictly speaking no match funding has ever been a requirement for a successful application but it always helps to show the commitment of the community to the project if there is an element of own funds included, no matter how small.