QFUTURES Community Fund (North Yorkshire)

The QFUTURES Community Fund aims to make a real difference to people living and working in rural communities, recognising the importance of strong, integrated local communities. As such, the Fund is designed to help organisations develop and improve collaborative and partnership working. We are looking for engaging community initiatives focused on strengthening and integrating local communities that are led and co-created to meet specific local and rural needs.

Fund priorities

Projects must be focused on working in collaboration and partnership to create strong, integrated local communities. To help organisations deepen their impact, these grants are offered as multi-year grants covering three years.

Priority will be given to applications demonstrating strong alignment with specific local needs, focusing on one or more of the following:

• Climate action and resilience
• Underrepresented groups and marginalised communities
• Those impacted by neurodiversity

Examples of collaboration or partnership projects that could be funded (this is not an exhaustive list):

• Creating community development networks and hubs that strengthened local connections
• Initiatives to improve integration for migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking communities.
• Neighbourhood-scale projects finding solutions to climate impact while fostering social cohesion.
• Co-created, tailored decarbonisation plans to strengthen local community resilience
• Future-proofing community spaces by strengthening leadership and governance, and supporting rural resilience and net-zero goals.
• Supporting innovative solutions like income-generating projects and skills development.
• Using local cultural and natural resources to improve health and wellbeing through cross-sector partnerships

What grants can be used for

We understand the pressures community groups face. A QFUTURES grant supports leadership time to reflect, learn, and lead. Exploring, developing and maintaining collaboration takes time and resources. This grant is designed to give charity and voluntary sector leaders the time and space to build relationships, pilot new ideas and ways of working and to facilitate shared learning.

We are keen to support community-led collaborations that strengthen local connections and shared purpose to address local challenges, build inclusive partnerships, and foster long-term resilience. Strong and successful collaborations need structure.

We welcome applications from groups either as partnership applications or from a single organisation:

• Exploring collaborative working and partnerships for the first time
• Looking to deepen and strengthen collaborations
• Already working together to create meaningful change, especially those involving smaller organisations and underrepresented voices

We expect you to think about how:

• Inclusive decision-making will be fostered and ensured (e.g. how you will handle differences of opinion)
• You will create clear roles and expectations (incl. who will be the named lead partner if you are submitting a partnership bid)
• Workloads will be shared
• Diversity in size, type, and voice will be reflected, ensuring smaller groups are not just included, but empowered.
• The above will be worked into a Memorandum of Understanding (you must submit this if you are applying as a partnership)

We do not expect you to have all the answers and we do not expect all ideas to work; we simply want to enable the time and space needed to explore collaborative ways of working that will help strengthen York communities.