Grassroots Grants

The scheme is now closed.

The Grassroots grants scheme ran from 2009-2011 and provided hundreds of community led groups with small grants upto £5,000.

Case Studies

Little Actors Youth Theatre

The Little Actors Youth Theatre (LAYT’s), received a Grassroots Grant for £2,800 for venue hire, for rehearsal, and the assistant directors fees for LAYT’s production of Macbeth. The production will be performed at Tara Studio in London in February 2010 and also at the Neston Civic Centre in March.

The aim of the group is to provide young people aged 11+ with performance experience. The young people also develop communication, interaction and social skills by working as a team. This creates a sense of ownership and responsibility as well as developing self-expression, pride in their work, confidence and group self-esteem. Respect for one another and all areas of society is essential and through the theatre group, the young people can engender a sense of respect and achievement.

‘Being involved with Tara Studios and having the chance to perform in London is a unique experience and one that not many of our young people would usually be able to access. The Grassroots Grant scheme has enabled us to be able to go to London and tour 3 venues performing Shakespeare’s Macbeth’, Samantha Giblin, Artistic Director of The Little Actors Youth Theatre.

Macclesfield Cricket Academy

Macclesfield Cricket Academy received a grant for £4319. This benefited 120 junior members, plus all our visiting sides (22weeks,min 6 games, 22 players per game).

Macclesfield Cricket Academy is an independent junior club for 7 to 18 year olds but affiliated club to Macclesfield Cricket Club. The adult cricket club had struggled to survive with half of its 20 members students.
The Aim of the Academy is to become a centre of excellence for the development of young players to feed into Macclesfield CC and other surrounding clubs who struggle with resources to develop young players to the level required.

We have parent coaches qualified to Level 2 but our players aged 14+ needed to work with a more experienced senior coach (Level 3) as experience told us that parent coaches cannot develop them beyond this age and they become frustrated and often leave cricket altogether. We were able to fund such a coach for 6 months during the summer and allow further subsidised coaching during the winter with the same coach

In 2008 the pitch that most junior games and development senior games (most of the development teams are made up of our Academy players) were played was not maintained well and we did not have people with time and skills to do this job. Using £1500 of the grant we were able to pay for 7.5hours a week for specialist work on the pitch which had suffered from drain damage and waterlogging to ensure the pitches were suitable for better cricket.
The site screens were in a poor state of repair, they need some specialist attention so a further £280 was spent to make them servicable
There was no shelter on the junior pitch and particularly in showery or very hot weather everyone including juniors as young as 8 struggle to keep warm/cool depending on the weather.
The improved condition of the ground will also benefited casual users who use the ground for social recreation and allowed the club to be able to make the pitch available for activities to encourage widening participation

Brereton Playgroup

The Grassroots Grant gave us the opportunity to replace the old flooring at playgroup, repair our leaking roof & guttering & gave us a chance to organize & sort our storage facility making it much easier to get to our equipment & allowing us to see what we had to use for the benefit of our children. Without the money it would have taken a considerable amount of fundraising that would have taken us a number of years to achieve and some of the project would have been shelved until we could have afforded it. Thanks to Grassroots we have improved our facilities for children attending playgroup now & for years to come.