Northern Ireland groups share in £592,282 grants windfall from Awards for All
12 Jun 2014 04:22 PM
An organisation working
with young people across north Belfast’s interfaces is one of 70 groups
in Northern Ireland sharing in a grants windfall of £592,282 from the Big
Lottery Fund’s Awards for All programme.
A full list of awards is available
here
The small grants programme has
awarded £6,500 to Cliftonville
Community Regeneration Forum Limited for a project that will give
young people the opportunity to organise a summer fun day in the Waterworks
Park on 12th July.
It comes as Big Lottery Fund
celebrates its 10th birthday, having supported more than 7,000 community
projects and invested £302 million across Northern
Ireland.
Awards for All offers community,
voluntary and statutory groups the chance to apply for small grants of between
£500 and £10,000 that will have a big impact on local communities
and the lives of people most in need.
Cliftonville Community
Regeneration Forum Limited is an umbrella group for community groups that work
across interfaces in the Cliftonville and Antrim Road areas of north
Belfast.
The family fun day takes place
in the Waterworks Park in north Belfast on 12th July between 1pm and 6pm. It is
being organised by a team of young leaders, with support from Let Youth Lead,
which is a youth project from Cliftonville Community Regeneration
Forum.
Karen Rice, outreach and
detached youth development worker for Let Youth Lead, said: “We
don’t have a youth centre in the area so for us it’s really
important to get out on the street, engaging with young people and encouraging
them to get involved in positive activities and learn new
skills.
“As we know, the summer is
a highly contentious period and there’s more risk of young people
engaging in a range of risk taking activities, therefore we felt it was
necessary to be out on the streets encouraging them to get involved in the wide
range of youth activities and programmes that will be running across the
area.
“By getting involved in
planning and running community events, young people are directly changing the
perception the local community have of them. We’ve had comments from
people within the community on how good it is to see young people getting
involved in these sorts of events and taking a leadership role
too.”
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Karen said that the young people who get involved with the programme are
gaining organisational, communication and team building skills as well as
taking on a positive role in the community. She said: “From previous
community events we’ve done you can see the sense of pride from the young
people who have helped organise the events. The young people are becoming role
models to the younger ones who ask ‘When can I do that? When can I help
out?’” &n
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Paul McMenamy, 18, is one of the
young people involved in organising the 12th July event. “I don’t
have any extra-curricular activities in school so being involved in the club
has really helped with my CV and application to university and kept me from
just running about the streets. I’m helping to plan the fun day on the
12th July, organising the volunteers and games for the younger ones,” he
said.
The Family Care Society, which
provides services and support for families and children involved in adoption
and care across Northern Ireland, also received £9,960. It will use the
grant to produce a DVD of Life Stories that will encourage and support young
people to take part in its Life Story project. It supports young people aged
between eight and 20 who are involved in the care system to map their lives
from birth to present.
Rosemary Hurl, Chief Executive
of the Family Care Society, said: “When children are taken into
care, they often don’t know what is happening. Children rely on us to
help them feel secure and to help them understand. Some people think that work
like this is a luxury, but every young person who goes into care - be it for
four weeks, one year or permanently - needs help to make sense of it
all.
“We felt that a DVD could
have more impact and convey information about this work in a way that is more
accessible to young people than giving them something to read. We hope to get
young people who have been through the Life Story work involved in the process
of producing the DVD.”
Joanne McDowell, Big Lottery
Fund NI Director, said: “The Big Lottery Fund’s NI Awards for All
programme funds health, education, environment and community projects that help
people bring about positive change in their lives, improve health and
well-being, develop skills and create safer
communities. &n
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“The application process
is simple and accessible and shall remain so, making it easy for applicants to
successfully apply for small pots of funding that can have such a big impact on
local communities and lives.”
Application forms and guidance
notes are available to download atwww.biglotteryfund.org.uk. For more details call us on 028
9055 1455, or e-mail us atenquiries.ni@biglotteryfund.org.uk
FOR MEDIA ENQUIRIES - PLEASE
CONTACT
Lucy Gollogly, Big Lottery Fund Press Office: 028 90 551 432 (office hours)
Out of hours contact: 07740 284 404
Notes to
editors
• The Big Lottery Fund
is responsible for giving out 40% of the money raised for good causes by the
National Lottery.
• The Fund is committed to bringing real improvements to communities
and the lives of people most in need and has been rolling out grants to health,
education, environment and charitable causes across the UK. Since its inception
in 2004 BIG has awarded close to £6bn.
• The Fund was formally established by Parliament on 1 December
2006.
• In the year ending 31 March 2013, 28% of total National Lottery
revenue was returned to the Good Causes.
• Since the National Lottery began in 1994, £31 billion has
been raised and more than 400,000 grants awarded across arts, sport, heritage,
charities, health, education and the environment.