Grants from the Design Council

Design Council Cabe is distributing grants to support smaller organisations to work with the local community and support their aspiration for the design quality of developments in their area. Two types of grants of up to £7,000 are being awarded to help communities develop their own vision for how their built environment should evolve and engage in local design review to uphold the design quality of forthcoming development projects. Find out more about the winners of the 2011-2012 Grants below.

Design Review Grant

Five grants totalling £35,000 have been awarded to local design review panels in Staffordshire, London, Wakefield and Hull to help them explore new ways to involve the community in reviewing the design quality of proposed new developments in their area.

Arc in Hull, with two design review grant awards, proposes to work with two school communities and a neighbourhood group in Kingswood; Open City in London proposes to work with a residents design review panel in Barking and Dagenham; Beam in Wakefield proposes to work with community in South Kirby to develop as well as review a design proposal.

Neighbourhood Projects Grant

The Neighbourhood Projects Small Grants Programme has selected 13 organisationsfrom  across the country to receive small grants, totalling £79,000, to provide advice and support to community groups to help them improve design quality in neighbourhood projects.

They range from the Bath Preservation Trust, to Groundwork in Merseyside, MADE in Birmingham, the North of England Civic Trust in Cumbria and Sustrans in Buckinghamshire. Each will fund a unique project, ranging from creating a design ‘vision’ for a village, to a neighbourhood climate change mitigation design strategy or starting a self-build design collective for vulnerable young people.