National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF)
On Monday (1st December) the ECH Secretary (Robin) and I met the NLHF along with Holly (the diocesan Historic Church Buildings Support Officer).  This was our first chance to talk directly to someone from the NLHF and explore aspects of our project and our grant application.

There is yet more to the process than we had understood to date, some of which we will get from the architects or other specialists. In other areas we need to improve how we describe them to clearly demonstrate to the NLHF that we are meeting their grant rules and requirements.

I think we got a decent bill of health overall but we have more to do – Robin and I met again to work out what that is and concluded with a (yet again) larger to-do list.

We can’t give a date by which the NLHF Grant Application will be made as we need to receive answers from third parties – but I remain hopeful that we can still submit the grant application soon(ish).

One extra thing we did learn is that the NLHF is currently receiving substantial numbers of grant requests and this means we must be as good as we can be to give ourselves the best chance of getting a “yes” from them.

In other (good) news…

We have applied for and been granted an interest free loan from the Cambridgeshire Historic Churches Trust that will help us cover the time gap between completing the project and receiving the final funds from the NLHF.

PJ Bryant, Chair ECH