Gavin McLaughlin is Communications Officer for City Hall’s regeneration team. He gives us an update on the Mayor’s crowdfunding programme.
Yesterday, the Mayor announced that 20 crowdfunding campaigns will each receive a financial ‘pledge’ of up to £20k from City Hall.
This is the third round of funding for a pilot scheme we’ve been running with Spacehive. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s the world’s first crowdfunding website dedicated to civic projects. Through Spacehive, community groups can publicly pitch ideas to regenerate their local areas.
In the first two rounds of the scheme, the previous Mayor pledged a total of £600,000 to 35 projects. Over 2,000 other people also backed the projects.
This new way of fundraising and match funding is a great way to support grassroots ideas. For our team, it helps us identify those projects with strong local support and make them happen. The projects are then run by local people in those communities. The scheme is very inclusive. It’s a fantastic way of boosting civic pride and getting Londoners involved in their local area.
In our latest round of projects, we’re supporting a new lido in Peckham, a family sleepover in Myatt’s Fields Park, and a healthy, sustainable fish and chips van in east London.
We held a special event at City Hall last night for the winning community groups. They found out how much they’re receiving from the Mayor. Now, they all have just one more month to reach their fundraising targets.
As crowdfunding is an ‘all or nothing’ model, they must raise the full amount for their projects to happen! If they raise 99% or 99.9% - anything under 100% in fact - none of the pledges from the crowd will actually be paid to them to complete.
This means even the successful campaigns still need public support on top of the Mayor’s. Find out more about the projects below and make a pledge to them.
If you’ve got an idea to improve your local area, we’ll be running another round of crowdfunding in the autumn. You can sign up to receive more information nearer the time by submitting your email address.