Design Council announces grant recipients

Design Council CABE is to give grants totalling £114,000 to 14 organisations, to fund their work with local communities.

Thirteen organisations have been selected to benefit from the first grant scheme, the Neighbourhood Projects Small Grants Programme, which will award sums totalling £79,000. The groups will provide advice and support to community groups to help them improve design quality in neighbourhood projects.

Those benefitting include the Bath Preservation Trust, Groundwork in Merseyside, MADE in Birmingham, the North of England Civic Trust in Cumbria and Sustrans in Buckinghamshire.

Each organisation will fund a unique project, ranging from creating a design vision for a village, to starting a self-build design collective for vulnerable young people.

The second grant scheme, the Design Review Small Grants Programme, will award five sums of money totalling £35,000 to local design review panels in Staffordshire, London, Wakefield and Hull.

The groups will use the money to find new ways of involving communities in reviewing the design quality of proposed local developments.

Commenting on the outcome of the grant awards schemes, Diane Haigh, director of Design Council CABE said:

“Supporting communities in developing their own vision for their area, and involving them with local design review is vital in ensuring that Britain’s new planning system empowers people and is truly accountable.”