The National Lottery
funding body, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), and the National Trust have
joined forces to find and back ambitious and sustainable solutions to protect
and enhance public parks and green spaces.
The Future Parks
Accelerator (FPA) is a UK-wide £10m strategic initiative to enable up to eight
local authorities and communities to develop and implement bold and innovative
funding and management solutions for all their green spaces across their place,
against a challenging backdrop of financial uncertainty.
The FPA will support
places to grow the contribution parks make to civic life whilst becoming
financially sustainable. It will involve discovering how parks and green spaces
could be better used, managed and funded to serve community needs and
aspirations now and over the next generation.
With grant funding
and support from a team of experts, the places chosen to be FPA pioneers will
work as a cohort to catalyse and share innovation, learn rapidly together and
build their capacity to lead for ambitious change both in their place and to benefit
the rest of the UK. It will encourage new partnerships whilst supporting
the role of local authorities as vital owners, funders and co-managers of green
spaces.
It will promote an
holistic approach, ensuring that all parks and green spaces in an area are
protected and enhanced to deliver quality and fair access to green spaces for
free for everyone.
The initiative will
run over two years and combine £5m in HLF grant funding with £5m in value of
National Trust expertise. It opens for expressions of interest today, with a
deadline of midday Monday 19 November. A number of places will then be
invited to submit a full application later this year with decisions on which
places will receive support made in February 2019.
Ros Kerslake, HLF
CEO, said: “Our ambition is simple - we want to grow and secure
the future of our public parks so generations in times to come
will have access to the wide range of benefits they provide.
"There are big
challenges facing parks but equally big opportunities. This strategic
initiative will help everyone invested in parks to take action and find
new ways to ensure they are safeguarded so they are able to fulfil
their potential to deliver health and wellbeing. These insights stem from
over £950m of National Lottery investment in 900 park projects
over 20 years and our recent combined investment of over £3m in
parks innovation.”
Hilary McGrady,
Director-General of National Trust, said: “The National Trust was founded in
the late 19th century to protect urban green space from development for
everyone in the local community to enjoy.
"Those founding
principles remain as relevant today as public parks and green spaces are again
under significant pressure, this time from budget cuts. That’s why we are
committed to offering our expertise and experience to help councils and
communities to find long-term solutions which will not only safeguard their
public green spaces, but allow them to thrive.
"There’s no one
size fits all approach and different places will have different opportunities
and challenges.
"We look
forward to working with ambitious local authorities to find a way to look after
these wonderful places that bring millions of people together to enjoy nature,
the outdoors and a sense of freedom.”
