We believe there is a need to put more power, resources and decision-making into the hands of local communities, to enable them to transform and improve their lives and the places in which they live.
We do this by trusting local people. Our aims are to demonstrate the value of long term, unconditional, resident-led funding through our work supporting local communities make their areas better places to live, and to draw on the learning from our work to promote a wider transformation in the way policy makers, funders and others engage with communities and place.
In practice, we are:
- Supporting Big Local partnerships to achieve their ambitions
- Delivering and commissioning great research, evaluation, analysis and storytelling from Big Local, and using this to influence and inform policy and practice nationally and locally
- Developing new ways to achieve a transformation in the way policy makers, funders and others engage with communities and place.
You can read more about our approach in our Local Trust strategy 2020-26.
Our history
Local Trust was established in 2012 to deliver Big Local, a National Lottery Community Fund-funded programme which committed £1m each to 150 neighbourhoods across England. The £217m originally provided by The National Lottery Community Fund to support this programme is the largest single-purpose Lottery-funded endowment ever made, and the biggest ever investment by a non-state funder in place-based, resident-led change.
In terms of scale, time horizon and ethos, nothing like Big Local has ever existed. Designed from the outset to be radically different from other funding programmes, at the heart of Big Local is a vision of empowered, resilient, dynamic, asset-rich communities making their own decisions on what is best for their area. In 2019, half way into delivering Big Local, we reported on what we have learned so far.