Here at St Peter’s, finally, the scaffolding has been removed and the disruption ended. The dust has settled (everywhere!) and we are beginning to see the benefits of our building development and maintenance work. The church is properly “Open, Warm and Welcoming” again and we look forward to more visitors coming to have a look around the building and enjoying the benefits of the increased space at the back of church. Many of our coffee gathering people have enjoyed this already.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund

The main source of St Peter’s Church funding has come from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The parent body is the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF). The NHMF allocates Lottery funds to heritage: The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the distributor of these funds.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund is a non-departmental public body accountable to Parliament via the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Their decisions about individual applications and policies are entirely independent of the government.

The NLHF believe that understanding, valuing and sharing our heritage brings people together, inspires pride in communities and boosts investment in local economies.

They distribute National Lottery grants from £3,000 to £5million, funding projects that sustain and transform the UK’s heritage and provide leadership and support across the heritage sector, and advocate for the value of heritage.

With every purchase of a ticket, National Lottery players raise money for good causes. The National Lottery Heritage Fund is one of 12 distributors of this funding.

Since 1994, the National Lottery has raised more than £39billion for good causes. Of this, they have distributed £7.9bn to over 43,000 heritage projects.

For St Peter’s this is the third time we have been successful in attracting lottery funding. Thanks go to Arthur Nightingale for his sterling work in this respect previously. Alan, Simon and Mike have spent hours on the application process, which is divided into a development phase and delivery phase. The delivery phase has created changes in our church layout. The HLF expect us to deliver on some community aspects as well as the renovation work. We are developing the heritage aspect of the building and explaining this on interpretation boards within church. Heritage information is to be placed onto our website and we have trained volunteers to lead heritage tours for visitors. These are all aspects which the HLF will assess us on after the project.

The final comment about the HLF grant is to say that without those playing the lottery we would have really struggled, so “thank you” to them. Imagine the church without the £1.2 million having been spent on it. That is an awful lot of years of coffee gatherings and pop-up shops and other fundraising events!

Additional grants have come from other organisations which we would like to tell you about.

Yorkshire Historic Churches Trust is a non-denominational charity whose objective is to help churches in Yorkshire through offering grants for repairs and maintenance. They were founded in 1988 and have granted £3 million to 800 churches. This is our second grant from YHCT. The trustee who visited us was very impressed with the work we had already completed. The PCC has agreed that St Peter’s should be a church “friend” of the trust, but anyone can sign up to be a “friend” through their website.

AllChurches Trust is linked to the Ecclesiastical Insurance Group (our church insurer) and was formed in 1972. They came into existence through the insurance group which aims to give it’s profits back to society. They support the repair, restoration and wider community uses of churches and cathedrals of all denominations and from 1972 have given away £171 million.

The Wolfson Foundation award grants to support and promote excellence in the field of science, health, education and the arts and humanities. The fund was set up in 1955 by Sir Isaac Wolfson who was the chairman of Great Universal Stores. They have given away a total of £800 million to 10000 projects on the basis of expert peer review. Well done to us as this is our second grant from them!

The Willian and Jane Morris Fund was bequeathed by May Morris in memory of her parents. Her father was the founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. It was founded in 1939 and grants are given to support work carried out to the principles of the SPAB. It is administered through the Society of Antiquaries of London. Our grant from this fund is specifically directed to our window restoration.

Finally, thanks has to go to each member of the congregation because through our fund raising at the social events, the money raised at coffee gatherings and pop-up shop as well as other donations we have raised a very impressive amount towards this work. The completion of our “maintenance “work will allow us, as a church, to focus on our “mission” work with the development of the reception area and the opening up of the Narthex which are the first visible signs of things to come.

Please continue to pray for the Church, its Mission, the Building Group, the Wardens and Vicar as we move into what will be an exciting period of time.