Successes, Challenges, and Lessons Learned: The Communities Innovating Yorkshire Fund

Uncategorized Tuesday 5 August 2025

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Written by Lauren Cox

Additional resource to explore academic-policy engagement with communities in their places

The Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) programme funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) provides resources to explore regional inequalities through inclusive academic-policy engagement by working with communities in their places. The LPIP projects based in each of the four devolved nations are all utilising their UKRI funding to produce collaborative research on inclusive and sustainable growth impact, as well as delivering a commissioning programme for actionable insights linked to the wider project activities.

The Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership (YPIP) designed and delivered the Communities Innovating Yorkshire (CIY) Fund, led by the YPIP core team based at The University of Leeds Business School. The CIY Fund offered an additional £800,000 of resource to extend the reach and impact of the YPIP project through exploration of the 5 overarching themes led by collaborations of stakeholders across the region:

• Theme 1: Collecting and utilising community data
• Theme 2: Good work and better business
• Theme 3: Culture and creative industries
• Theme 4: Climate-ready places
• Theme 5: Communities in their places

The CIY Fund process 

Starting with a ‘watch this space’ announcement through various channels in December 2024, the CIY Fund criteria and guidance documents were created. The fund went live on Monday 3 February 2025 where the core team engaged with large numbers of stakeholders from across the region through answering queries coming into the inbox, visiting community spaces and events, and hosting 7 information webinars. Throughout the seven-week application period, the conversations and questions raised informed a live FAQs document that was uploaded to the CIY Fund webpage and updated over time.

During the latter half of the application period, the CIY Fund review panel were recruited which comprised of the two YPIP co-directors, 5 members of the YPIP Community Panel, and 5 subject matter experts each representing one of the fund themes. This ensured a balanced approach having equal academic expertise and community perspective in the decision-making process.

Following the application deadline on Sunday 23 March 2025, the 236 applications received were initially sifted and reviewed for anything incomplete or ineligible. The 12 reviewers were invited by the core team to two briefing sessions on their role and the scoring system and were provided with written guidance. The applications which passed the first sift were then redacted of all personal information and distributed amongst the review panel. Each application was reviewed by four people and the panellists worked throughout April to complete their scoring. The core team provided a mid-point check-in meeting with the panel which was an interesting discussion on how they were finding the process so far, and an opportunity to sense check how individuals were approaching the scoring, especially for those where this was a new experience.

When scores were returned at the end of April, the core team calculated average scores and examined the top scores from the seedcorn and larger funding pathways. There needed to be a reasonable threshold to identify the applications to discuss at the final review session, considering each theme, sub region, and amount of funding available. The agreed thresholds led to 39 applications being shortlisted for the final review. The final decisions were made on Tuesday 20 May 2025 where the 12 panellists spent the day having constructive and respectful conversations considering the project proposals against the overall aims and criteria of the CIY Fund. The group concluded on awarding 22 projects funding spread across the four sub-regions of Yorkshire and five themes.

“The final session was engaging and collaborative. It was inspiring to hear a range of viewpoints and work together to make informed funding decisions.”

“I found myself getting more involved than I thought I would. I was able to do that as I felt supported within the space.”

“…it felt like a genuine process of collaboration between academic and community attendees”

Successes and proud moments 

The Communities Innovating Yorkshire Fund received a huge volume of interest and had a far reach across the region. With over 300 expressions of interest and enquiries into the team inbox, over 200 attendees across 7 information webinars, and 236 applications received, the YPIP team engaged with a diverse range of stakeholders that were attracted to this opportunity. This was clearly reflected in the breadth of ideas that came through in the project proposals and the collaborative teams that had been brought together to work on these.

Another success of the CIY Fund is the group of reviewers that were brought together to support the decision-making process. The broad range of professional and lived experience expertise created a collaborative space for considering projects with the spirit of YPIP in combining the skills and knowledge of academia, policy makers and communities for informed decision making. The positive feedback received from the review panel shared how they felt supported and confident throughout the process and had a positive experience in being involved in this work.

“I have been on a number of such panels before and thought this was very well organised and explained.”

“I knew someone was only an email away. This was very helpful.”

“The team did a great job in keeping us informed and providing information and guidance.”

“I learned a lot from listening to the other participants’ experiences and thoughts.”

“The role challenged me to think critically about inclusivity and innovation and provided a chance to collaborate with others passionate about Yorkshire’s future.”

Challenges and lessons learned 

The high levels of interest in the CIY Fund also presented a few challenges for the team and for the funding programme. The £800,000 overall funding amount seems like a large sum of resource to distribute, but this was limited in comparison to the quantity of funds requested through the submitted applications. The YPIP project team were keen to have an equitable spread of resource across the thematic and geographical areas, which meant that challenging considerations had to be made when making final decisions. The CIY Fund received large numbers of applications that were valuable and positive when considered in isolation, but when having to factor in the overarching aims, objectives and principles of the funding programme, this meant that many did not quite make the cut.

The management and delivery of the fund was conducted by the small YPIP core team who have additional workloads on top of this programme, which limited the amount of one-to-one support that could be offered to applicants. Similarly, this type of funding programme was a new experience to the team, reviewers and applicants, so the process would have benefitted from less use of academic language and more accessible explanations of the funding aims and objectives. Both reviewers and applicants commented that examples would have been beneficial for better understanding on the criteria elements.

“I think we all realised that the criteria could use some tweaking, but it was basically a very thorough and well-managed process.”

“the traditional application format and academic language sometimes made it difficult… incorporating more contemporary submission methods — such as visuals or videos — could better showcase the creativity and diversity of projects.”

Next steps for the CIY Fund 

The onboarding process for the 22 successful projects is underway and they will be delivering work until September 2026. You can find out more about the projects here . The CIY Fund projects will be engaging with the YPIP project team and relevant thematic work packages. There will be touchpoints throughout the process and each project will be visited to engage first hand with the work they’re delivering. YPIP will be hosting a showcase event in November 2026 to share the insights and findings of these projects.

All applicants to the CIY Fund have received a Signposting Pack with information across the region around infrastructure support, academic-policy engagement networks, thematic partnerships, and policy updates. As well as sharing this resource to create awareness of potential connections within the region, the team have requested the consent of the CIY Fund applicants to share a summary of their project proposals and their contact details with internal YPIP project collaborators and external partners such as the NHS and Public Health to explore alternative opportunities for these ideas.

Sign up to the YPIP newsletter mailing list to receive monthly updates on the progress of the CIY Fund projects and the wider YPIP project.