From conservation to communities - celebrating 15 years of lottery investment
This autumn the National Lottery celebrates its 15th anniversary. Thousands of people regularly buy a lottery ticket which generates £25million every week for good causes. It’s thanks to lottery players that the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has been able to support nearly 30,000 projects – to the tune of £4.3billion – the biggest concentrated investment ever made into the UK’s heritage. These include national institutions, historic houses, public parks, wildlife and traditional skills.
HLF is the Woodland Trust’s largest grant funder and we have benefited from over £12 million of HLF money for a wide range of exciting projects over their 15 years. These include buying and protecting valuable sites like Brede High Woods, and Glen Finglas in Scotland; projects to engage and educate lots of people, like the Ancient Tree Hunt and Nature Detectives; and our work with other partners and landowners at a landscape scale as in the Faughan Valley in Northern Ireland where we will be protecting ancient woodland, creating new woodland and helping the people of Derry to access and understand the countryside there.