Cymru Wledig LPIP Rural Wales – Community-led Action Research
Grant call – Community-led Action Research Phase 2:
Do you have something like a theme, issue or idea in your community that you would like to know more about?
Do you care about exploring topics that will make a positive change for your community?
We have a £20,000 Funding Opportunity available for 6 projects in Rural Wales
We are now inviting applications to apply for a fund of up to £20,000, which will enable a community to explore a topic to create knowledge on a matter important to them, that will help make a difference locally.
Successful Applicants will receive:
- Up to £20k to deliver the plan
- Insight, expertise and support from an academic mentor
- Training on skills needed for research project management, collecting information such as survey design, leading interviews, mapping where things are or collecting environmental samples.
The funding and mentoring support is available from September 2025 to June 2026.
The deadline for applications is 29th August 2025 at midnight.
Application forms:
Grant Call Webinar:
Click on the cog icon on the bottom right of the playback screen then click on ‘settings’ then on ‘audio’ to choose between English and Welsh language. If you are viewing this video on a smart phone you might need to click on the left facing arrow on the bottom right of the playback screen to view the cog icon to select settings and the choice of Welsh audio.
Frequently asked questions:
The LPIP Rural Wales Community-led Action Research Fund is a £150,000 funding opportunity for six places across rural Wales. It is designed to support research projects at a community level with a £20,000 fund per community plus support from an academic mentor and additional training.
The fund aims to support citizens in a place to gain knowledge on a topic important to their community that would help make a difference locally. The themes that this funding supports are:
- Building a Regenerative Economy
- Supporting the Net Zero Transition
- Empowering Communities for Cultural Recovery
- Enhancing Wellbeing in Place
The fund is provided by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and Innovate UK as part of the Rural Wales Local Policy and Innovation Partnership, led by Aberystwyth University.
The call opens on the 15th June 2025. Application forms can be submitted for consideration by midnight on 29th August 2025.
A topic or theme that citizens in a place want to take action on and that fits within the four Rural Wales LPIP themes.
One of the important things about action research is that the evidence gathered about a topic is done for the purpose of taking action to make a change, rather than gathering information that remains dormant, and isn’t shared publicly. After the evidence is gathered and analysed, a plan of action is created for the next steps of what to do with this new knowledge, because knowledge is power. This might include applying forfurther funding or speaking to decision makers at local or national level or engaging with local people or visitors who might not be involved in the research.
The Rural Wales LPIP is looking at four key themes outlined in more detail below, which most topics would naturally fall under. If you are not sure if your topic is relevant, please get in touch with Amy Nicholass at amy.nicholass@tfc.cymru before the application deadline.
Building a Regenerative Economy
This theme includes ideas for promoting ‘growth’ and ‘innovation’ in a rural context and how to ensure that the workforce have required skills. It includes entrepreneurship and business support and development across sectors including agri-food, tourism, energy, manufacturing, and services, with aims of addressing the ‘missing middle’ of medium-sized firms in rural Wales, increasing productivity, raising wage levels, and helping to retain young people in rural communities.
Supporting the Net Zero Transition
This theme includes projected changes in rural land use and farming practices (e.g. afforestation, increased renewable energy production, land management for ecosystem services), and associated shifts in types of income generation in the rural economy, as well as impacts on rural communities, businesses and service provision from the removal of carbon-based transport and energy. Opportunities for innovation to support sustainable behaviours and practices are also covered.
Empowering Communities for Cultural Recovery
This theme includes sustaining majority Welsh-speaking communities, and wider local rural identities and cultures and embedding the inclusion of diverse rural populations in local development. It includes the contribution of rural and Welsh language culture and heritage in supporting inclusive and sustainable economic growth.
Enhancing Wellbeing in Place
This theme includes issues around poverty, inequality, and deprivation; health and care; housing; and access to services – including understanding processes shaping these issues (e.g. social determinants of health, financial exclusion, etc.), the impacts of policy decisions (e.g. rationalization of public services) and exploring innovation in policy and practice to enhance wellbeing.
Yes, applicants can submit multiple applications if they are for different research project ideas. However, each project must meet the eligibility criteria and demonstrate clear alignment with LPIP Rural Wales Community-led Action Research aims.
£20,000 per community for a maximum of six communities across rural Wales. Each community receives an additional £5000 towards organisational project support from Together for Change.
A person representing an incorporated community-based organisation with access to a bank account can apply on behalf of a community in a specific location.
Community in this instance refers to a community within rural Wales in a location or place and can include communities of interest from within that place. Rural Wales means Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Conwy, Denbighshire, Gwynedd, Isle of Anglesey, Monmouthshire, Pembrokeshire, Powys and Vale of Glamorgan.
The opportunity is open to English speaking, Welsh speaking, bilingual or multi-lingual communities.
As a result of the experiences of the five communities supported to carry out community-led action research in phase 1 we recommend that each project has the following:
- Planning Team: a group of volunteers (who can choose to spend some of the fund to pay for their time to attend planning meetings or cover the travel and subsistence for planning meetings) who come together to work with the academic mentor to decide the research question and methodology and to decide who they want to influence with the findings.
- Community Research Coordinator (who can be hired under a freelance fixed term contract paid from the £20,000 fund or part of the fund can go towards part of the wages of someone already in post in a local organisation so some of their time can be allocated to coordinating the research).
- Delivery Team: this might be the Community Research Coordinator as well as action/community researchers who they coordinate. The researchers will have training to carry out the evidence gathering and sense making of what they find and how to present it to appeal to the people that they want to influence. The more researchers you have the more evidence you will be able to gather and build capacity in the community for further research projects beyond this topic. The researchers can voluntary or be allocated some of the fund for their time collecting the evidence and analysing and presenting it and/or their travel and subsistence.
We will expect the following from those applicants who are successful:
- Insurance for any staff and volunteers involved in the project. An organisation in the community might already have insurance for volunteers and they could be part of the planning and delivery team for the project.
- Ability to hold and manage the fund and budget with support from LPIP team. This could be in the form of a bank account or credit union account in the name of a community-based organization plus someone to manage a budget spreadsheet and make note of when spending has happened against the agreed budget and safely keep receipts and invoices to send to the LPIP team.
- Complete a simple due diligence process to ensure you have the capacity to manage the fund and the project. We would like to see your governing documents.
- Carry out risk assessments for all relevant project activities with support from LPIP team. If you do not have a community organisation as part of the team who are experienced with risk assessments the LPIP team can provide you with checklists and guidance, but you will need someone who can do these before any research can be carried out to ensure that everyone is kept safe.
- Project Reporting: this will be light touch recording of financial spending and invoices sent with evidence of receipts against the budget as well as demonstrating how the money had an impact locally, which can include short summary report about how the money was used or methods such audio or video recordings or art pieces.
- Action Research Project Report: of the research that has been undertaken, with guidance from academic mentor.
Keeping receipts and invoices related to the budget for 3 years after the closure of the project.
Management:
- Staff time for Research Coordinator and their oversight/manager.
- Third sector organisation overhead costs associated with delivery of the research project.
- Travel and subsistence for researchers and Research Coordinator
- Training costs from an external training outside the wider LPIP Rural Wales programme.
Organisation:
- Consultancy/technical support to help you carry out the research or analysis or presentation of the findings.
- Costs of online subscriptions to enable the research such as Dropbox, Microsoft Forms or Canva
- Vouchers for people who respond to surveys or take part in interviews
- Travel expenses to visit other communities to learn from them or support people to get to an event
Events:
- Workshops, events for researchers and the wider community
- Hiring a space for project planning meetings and training
- Refreshments for events, meetings or training
- Communications, post, stationary, printing, and dissemination
- Equipment and materials
- Interpreting and translation services for events or flyers, interviews etc.
- Pre-existing activities and ongoing operation
- Costs incurred before the grant approval
- Expenses that have not been agreed
- Projects solely focused on the development or delivery of a product or service
- Capital costs (i.e. infrastructure)
- Any personal details that have to be collected for the project are to be collected and stored in line with GDPR regulations for research purposes only.
- Details about the legal requirements for how data is used and stored for the purposes of research should be communicated clearly to research participants.
- Data storage and handling needs to follow the guidance laid out in the LPIP Data Management Plan.
- Your assigned academic mentor will discuss this with you and ensure appropriate procedures are in place.
No, match funding is not required.
If you are an applicant from an existing third sector organisation you may wish to increase the value and impact of the £20,000 fund by donating resources such as staff time, administrative support, transport if you run your own, catering if you run your own, or a space for the planning group to meet for free if you have your own space that would be heating and lighting anyway.
Application Process
Applications must be submitted via the application form at:
English https://forms.office.com/e/x3geu5QAyW
Cymraeg https://forms.office.com/e/T5HyiVn5e9
You only need to submit the application form online.
For applications to go to the next stage of being partnered with an academic mentor to design the research methodology and plan the budget in detail, they will be assessed on the following criteria:
- Clarity of idea;
- Potential impact;
- Strength of community interest;
- Feasibility of project idea to be delivered within the time frame;
- Fit with LPIP themes/match with potential mentor.
- Forms submitted will be reviewed and a shortlist of applications invited for interview online. 2-3 representatives from the shortlisted organisations will be invited to attend the online interview.
- A selection panel consisting of those with experience in grant giving, action research approaches, community development, rural economies will read all of the applications and decide which ones seem most likely to have a project that will be successful within the September 2025 – June 2026 timeframe, have the capacity to deliver the project and involve the local community, fit within the 4 LPIP themes and that can be matched easily with an academic mentor from the LPIP team with relevant skills, knowledge and experience.
- All applicants who have not been selected for funding have the option to join a network of action researchers with opportunities to join free online training sessions to support them to do their own community-led action research.
No, once an application has been submitted, it cannot be revised.
We will inform you if not successful. For those who are interviewed and not successful we will provide feedback.
- Contact Name
- Contact Email
- Contact Phone Number
- Constituted Organisation Name
- Does your organisation or group have their own bank account?
- Organisation or group address
- What is your research theme/ idea and why is it important to your community? What do you think might be the impact of doing the research? [up to 500 words]
- What would be your broad approach to the research? Why do you want to do it? Who would you work with in your community and how would you get them involved. We will work with you to develop the research plan in detail but for now we would like you to share your ideas so far. [up to 250 words]
- Briefly tell us how you’d spend the money on your project idea. We will help you plan out the final detailed budget and timeline but for now we would like you to share your initial thoughts. [up to 100 words]
Post-Award & Project Delivery
- Projects should begin as soon as possible after award notification.
- All projects must be completed by the end of June 2026.
Funding is paid through University of Aberystwyth via invoicing in a three-stage payment schedule. First payment upfront, second payment once the project research design (with support from the assigned academic mentor) is finalised and third payment towards the end of the project.
Support & Further Information
An information webinar will take place online on Wednesday 2nd July, 2025, 12:00-13:30 to outline the fund’s aims, application process, and assessment criteria. We encourage people to attend and ask questions at the webinar, but it is not compulsory to attend to progress your application.
The webinar joining instructions will be available on this webpage but if you would like the joining instructions emailed to you please send a request to amy.nicholass@tfc.cymru.
The webinar will also be recorded and available to watch back via the Together for Change website Cymru Wledig LPIP Rural Wales – Community-led Action Research – Together for Change
We are defining it as community of place, so that is location. It might be a hamlet or a town, a village, but within that location will be perhaps a community of interest. The LPIP funding is about rural Wales, so it is about a location, so that’s basically it. It’s quite broad. For example, I can tell you that one of our communities are in the Dyfi Estuary, so they were one of our allocated phase 1 communities, so they are two communities of interest. One community of interest are passionate about swifts, and the other is passionate about water quality. And they have their own voluntarily organisations, and they came together with an idea that they submitted to us that they wanted to do their research on. So that is two communities of interest that have come together in a community of place to submit an idea.
Yes.
Yes, if you’re a community council of any kind, that is fine as long as you’re showing that it is a project that’s coming up from the community. For example, it might be that a community council with their knowledge of what they think the community needs, but we would like to have evidence that idea has come from the community. The key thing is that you’d need a bank account, that a community council would tend to have but rather than it be the community council off their own back applying, they can do that but we want to see the evidence that the idea, you might’ve done some a previous consultation, or a previous project that shows actually this is something we want to explore more or you could speak to other organisations that are within the community that you are supporting as a council and say ‘what is it that you’re interested in?’ we’ve got an opportunity to apply for this so to do that sort of reach out element in order to apply for this grant. So I’m hoping that is ,yes, but we definitely need to see evidence that it’s coming from multiple sources in the community. To be inclusive is the main reason for this.
Yes.
Yes, the main thing is that the research takes place within that list.
Yes.
Yes.
We are hoping to start people off in October and we want it to be completed by end of June 2026. In experience of phase 1 it can take a little while to set up things like the planning team, to find the researchers, to find out who you want to influence as policy level and to actually gather the research and do the data analysis and to present it. Bearing in mind that you have Christmas holidays, Easter holidays, so think about it in terms of weeks and if you’re a planning team, a research team, with a coordinator, you have to hire the coordinator. You can see that actually, the time to do that data analysis can become quite short within that period.
It’s basically collaboratively decision making, participatory budgeting and you can do that in a way that works best for your community. You might need to change the budget around how to allocate things, so whilst we have an initial opportunity for anyone involved in the project who want to take part in the budgeting. An opportunity to inform that decision making, the LPIP and Together for Change will sign off on what we think that is a reasonable budget to deliver it in a reasonable amount of time to sense check it with you, it’s then a live document. If you do need to change it through the process of the grant, you come back to us and we negotiate that if it makes sense, we will be usually quite open to changing that around.
Yes, within those communities you can also apply.
The 29th of August, we’ve tried to give as long a deadline as we can give that as I said previously, we need to give people sufficient time to carry out the research because the whole of LPIP need to finish by December 2026, including all the evaluation and wrap up. It is quite a hard deadline of the 29th of August to complete your application, now I’m afraid that is the deadline. We understand that it might be that you have a top-level theme. What we want to hear from you though is who is contributing to that being an issue.
Unfortunately, no. We haven’t been told anything about the potential to extend the UK innovation research grant for the LPIP yet. If there is possibility, we will spread the news through all the channels we’ve spread the news through this time so if you are here today you should find out.
Absolutely, yes, those were just examples of what the training budget could be used for or what training you might need. It’s completely case by case.
Unfortunately no, it makes it tricky as we’re trying to be as fair as possible, and we will be assessing those applications quite soon after the deadline as you probably can understand, we are trying to fit in with the advisors’ group and the assessors who have holidays as well. So, if we have drip feeds of evidence after the application deadline, it’s going to be very difficult for us to compare different applications so I’m afraid it’s a no on that one.
You could say in your application is that “given the short deadline for understanding that this is an option for you, and that you want to gather more information for other people, is that you’ve tried your best and you’ve put this Facebook poll out and you’re waiting for people to respond and you haven’t had enough time”, to let us know that you’ve tried to do that r out each . Anything that you’ve tried to do, and it hasn’t come in time for the deadline, just make it clear that you’ve done that, and that might be that can enable you to get through to the interview.
We want your application to fit under a theme to make sure that it fits within the remit of the LPIP but it can fall under multiple themes. It just needs to align under one theme to make it relevant for the LPIP vs any other grants, but I would imagine that quite a few of the challenges in rural areas fall under many themes.
