From the Leader: Helping those who help our community

Last week, Wokingham Borough Council launched its own community lottery to help local good causes.  Modelled on the National Lottery, our community lottery offers much better support for local charities and community groups, as 50p in every pound goes to them, as compared with just 28p in the pound for good causes in the National Lottery.

Charities that help local people, and community groups – from swimming associations to theatre groups and choral societies – all play an important role in making Wokingham borough a good place to live and work.  They provide support for people who need it and offer opportunities for social engagement and physical and mental stimulation, which aid health and wellbeing.

Yet many such organizations are under financial pressure, with demand for their services increasing, income falling, and often with premises to maintain or hire. 

The council is of course in the same boat.  Our costs are rising, demand for our services is growing, and becoming more complex and expensive to meet, while our income is falling in real terms, and in danger of falling in absolute terms if the government continues to reduce our core revenue support (we lost £1 million this year and fear a bigger cut next year).

When times are hard, the temptation can be to pull one’s horns in and look inwards. The borough council is responding to its financial challenges in the opposite way – we are looking outwards to embrace the opportunities that working with others can bring.

By working together with bodies that want to help members of our community, we can achieve much more than we can on our own.  The pooling of experience, expertise, data, and resources – human, material, and financial – helps us all to stretch our efforts further.

It’s in that spirit that we decided to set up a local lottery to enable us, with a modest investment of money, to help those charities, voluntary organizations, and community groups that play such an important part in making our borough strong and resilient.

The local community lottery is associated with another piece of partnership working – the Communities Vision 2035.  The Vision is co-produced by the council and local charities, businesses, faith groups, health bodies, educators, and the Youth Council.  It has been endorsed by deep and wide public engagement.  The Vision sets out six broad ambitions for the borough – represented by the six weekly winning numbers of the local lottery.  The ambitions boil down to a desire to create an inclusive, thriving, green, and healthy future.

The bodies who are likely to become beneficiaries of the new local lottery are all contributing, in their different ways, to the realization of these ambitions.  A local swimming association, for instance, helps keep people physically active, while a theatre group or a choral society helps keep those involved mentally stimulated.  The result in both cases is healthier lives, with benefits for the individuals involved but also for the wider community, as we avoid or delay physical and mental health problems that require expensive interventions.

Our lottery enables you to support any of the registered local good causes, and if you run a business, you can donate prizes as well as buy tickets. 

We all win if our local charities and community groups are supported.

Cllr Stephen Conway is Leader of the Council

If you're interested in registering your organisation to raise money through the community lottery, please visit: https://www.wokinghamboroughcommunitylottery.co.uk/good-causes . Tickets will be available to play the lottery soon!