Taking the first question, there is likely to be closer scrutiny of your outcomes of current community projects. If you have successfully engaged your community to reduce CO2, you’ll be expected to achieve significant further CO2 reductions. However, this can also mean simply broadening involvement and appealing to new audiences not just additional activities from current participants.

This is by no means straightforward, as your engagement processes may well have picked off most of the low hanging fruit. Incremental carbon savings may be harder to achieve for 2 reasons. If your constituency of support is already eco-friendly, there may be significant barriers to getting them to go further still, e.g. where significant capital investment or private loan capital is required to generate your own electricity. Broadening the offering to engage other communities may require a change of tack, as they may be less responsive to the broad repertoire of carbon reduction actions, but may well have a discrete or niche interest.

But what if you’ve never applied before, or had an earlier application knocked back? Dusting down an earlier application and livening it up a bit may not be sufficient to attract the attention of those scrutinising applications. An obvious option is to look at what successful projects have done – you may be surprised at how willing communities are to share their experiences. But how to stand out and apart? If you are doing something quite different, imaginative and innovative – even if it carries some risk – this is will certainly make your application attractive.

Another problem, inherent and endemic to project funding, is the short time you will have to get results. If you’ve not done enough ‘community groundwork’ in advance, then you will have to build that element in. Your chances will be measurably increased through skillful community activism.

Even relatively well established projects may experience difficulties getting a new project running. Bolting on a new initiative can end up with a business as usual response from participants. Narrow interests or professionalisms reduce the scope for multi project synergies.

The associates at Future Proof have experience of all of these sorts of issues and can help you cut through the difficulties. If you are considering an new application to CCF and wish to have an informal no obligation chat with one of our consultants, please give us a call.