People’s Postcode Lottery offers £1m Dream Fund
Howard Lake | 2 September 2014 | News
Charities and community groups across Great Britain can now apply to the Dream Fund from the People’s Postcode Lottery. The £1 million fund is designed to support two ‘dream projects’ which can be created over a 24-month period.
This is the fifth year of the Dream Fund and is the largest sum it has offered so far. This year there is a first prize of £750,000 and a runner-up prize £250,000. These are open respectively to charities with incomes of above and below £1.5 million.
Every application must come from a collaboration of charities, with the lead being a registered charity. Other partners must be not for profit organisations.
Projects should support one of the following criteria:
- Advancement of participation in sports
- Advancement of community development
- Advancement of environmental protection
- Advancement of health
- Advancement of human rights
- Prevention of poverty, distress and sickness
Previous winners
To date the Dream Fund has granted over £1.4m to over 15 projects, including Missing People and WWF.
Missing People used the funding to work alongside PACT (Parents and Abducted Children Together) to develop an enhanced Child Rescue Alert system. The alert system has been designed to alert anyone by text, email or pop-up, who has signed up to the service to be alerted in the event of a child’s abduction.
Missing People CEO Jo Youle said:
Advertisement
“Put simply, we couldn’t have launched it without winning the Dream Fund. We aim to have one million people registered to receive Alerts by May 2015, helping us to raise the alarm when the worst happens.”
50p from every £2 People’s Postcode Lottery ticket is awarded to charity, with players having already raised £47.2 million for charities and good causes across Great Britain and globally to date.
People’s Postcode Lottery Head of Charities, Clara Govier, said:
“The Dream Fund is an opportunity for charities to finally work on a project they have always dreamed of. It’s designed to encourage charities and community projects to work together on a project that has always been just too big, or too expensive. Our previous winners have taken tremendous pride in finally seeing their dream projects come to life, all thanks to players of People’s Postcode Lottery.”
Applications to the Dream Fund are open until 30 September 2014. The winners will be announced at a charity gala in January 2015.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.