UK COMMUNITY RENEWAL FUND
Update 12 November 2021
South Yorkshire awarded over £8m in community funding
South Yorkshire organisations have successfully secured £8.2m in funding from the UK Community Renewal Fund.
South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority was designated as a lead authority by the government and worked with the four local councils in Barnsley, Rotherham, Doncaster and Sheffield to seek proposals from across the region that met the government’s stringent criteria for funding.
Eleven funding bids were submitted by South Yorkshire community organisations and eight were successful.
Barnsley MBC was awarded £2.3m from the UK Community Renewal Fund for the Barnsley Central Area-based Good Growth Pilot scheme. The project is designed to develop an innovative area-based model which will deliver good growth and build community relationships alongside skills, business, community and employability support.
Three Doncaster projects were successful including Business Doncaster receiving an award of £993k for the Decarbonising Doncaster project. The project supports the urgent work of Doncaster’s Climate Change Commission in tackling climate change emergencies whilst developing a sustainable green economy.
In addition, Business Doncaster and Doncaster Chamber’s Pathways to Recovery project received £581k. This is a large-scale community and enterprise project which will stimulate entrepreneurial activity, problem solving and innovation across all sectors of the community, reaching ‘hard to reach’ places.
Another Pathways to Recovery project, this time run by DN Colleges Group and Doncaster Progress was awarded funding of £640k. Doncaster Progress will use an integrated ‘skills accelerator’ approach to address skills challenges exacerbated by COVID-19. The project will provide flexible training and development with the aim of helping people progress on to qualifications including apprenticeships level 3 to 5 through local higher education providers.
In Rotherham, successful projects received almost £3m, which includes Labre’s Hope Project. This social enterprise project is designed to support homeless individuals in Rotherham into jobs through the provision of paid employment and skills development alongside wider life skills coaching and mentoring to address outcomes, including health improvement.
Also in Rotherham, Voluntary Action Rotherham’s Anything’s Possible project received an award of £607k. The project will run a range of activities to increase and improve employability, life chances and positive pathways, such as volunteering and work placements, employability and skills programme, life skills, interview preparation, mock interviews, skills audits and CV development.
In addition, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council’s Children’s Capital of Culture’s Creative and Cultural Skills Embassy Project received £1.8m. The project will support the Children’s Capital of Culture to provide traineeships, skills development and training alongside engagement and organisational development with key actors in the Creative and Cultural sector.
In Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University was successful in securing £622k for Levelling up Futures. This project is particularly focused on helping disadvantaged people in deprived areas with a package of employer-connected high impact interventions designed to prevent NEETs (Not in Education Employment or Training). It will be based around schools and pupils who have been adversely impacted through the pandemic.
The funding awarded to South Yorkshire was part of the £200m UK Community Renewal Fund which is designed to help with the levelling up agenda by investing in people, places, businesses and communities improving everyday life across the UK. Each local authority area had the opportunity to bid for up to £3m, which meant a potential total of £12m for South Yorkshire.