Rural communities
Too often, rural communities are without access to transport, jobs, housing, shops and community spaces. The Royal Countryside Fund powers community-led solutions through our grants and resources to ensure that they flourish – now and in the future.
Since 2010, we’ve invested more than £10 million in rural communities across the UK – over 400 projects, supporting nearly 200,000 people. From transport schemes to training vouchers, community breweries to food banks – we’re here when rural communities have a problem to tackle. Our grant programmes empower communities to create solutions which work for them, and help us to create a real future for rural Britain.
Since The Royal Countryside Fund was founded in 2010, we have supported 407 projects, including:
Community spaces
Transport schemes
Training and skills projects
People supported
Who we’ve helped:
Lincs Digital
Lincs Digital works to take digital services to people in rural Lincolnshire, where many local services such as Post Offices and banks have been closed down.
Rich, project manager said: “From a learners point of view, our beneficiaries have described the service as life changing or in some circumstances it has saved their lives. These people were in a position where they did not know what to do with so many local services closing and we have been able to open their eyes, and they now see a much brighter future because of it. Without The Royal Countryside Fund we wouldn’t be able to do any of the work we do, and none of these people in rural Lincolnshire with dwindling local services would have been able to receive our help.”
Solomon Browne Community Hall
Solomon Browne Community Hall, based in Mousehole, Cornwall, were awarded grant funding as part of The Royal Countryside Fund’s emergency Covid-19 response. They provided a whole range of support to their local community, including creating and delivering ‘Smile bags’ to people living alone or who are self-isolating.
Tamsin, SBCH Manager said: “It has been a lovely experience delivering our ‘Smile bags’. We’ve realised that the delivery is as important as the bags themselves, and we have had some lovely comments from people as we’re going. One lady who lives alone started crying when we called on her on Monday, as she was ‘so grateful that we would do this for her, and would think to call in on her and check that she was ok’. We are finding that this is such a worthwhile thing to do, as we can also check if people need any help with anything else as we’re going.”
