Who should decide how £1 million gets spent in the Cairngorms? The Cairngorms 2030 Communities fund is an investment in communities – with a twist. In 2026, communities designed the whole process of handing out £1 million from start to finish as part of the Cairngorms 2030 programme, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
The Cairngorms National Park Authority commissioned Involve to run a Co-design process. Co-design is a collaborative process in which citizens from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences work alongside Park Authority colleagues, who contribute their expertise in funding policy, to actively shape the grant fund at every stage, from initial ideas through to its final structure and governance, with minimal pre-defined boundaries.
“I felt part of something that will impact people in a positive way and hopefully attract new folks, hopefully folks feel the process is easier too.”
For us, helping people take a bigger role in local decision-making is core to our mission. We recruited eighteen residents, reflecting the diversity of communities in and around the National Park. We supported them directly, providing the guidance they needed to take part in the process with confidence.
For the Park Authority, this work offered a genuine chance to hand decision-making power to communities on the issues that matter most to them, and to trial a different way of working alongside the people of the Cairngorms.
These residents, now called ‘panel members’ were given real authority over a new way of grant making backed by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Not to advise on it, but to design it.
Together, with the Cairngorms National Park Authority we delivered the Co-design panel, which met over nine sessions between March and June 2026. Three of the sessions took place in person, with six taking place online, giving panel members the space and time to work through a deliberately wide brief. This wasn't a rubber-stamp exercise: everything from who can apply to how decisions about funding are made was genuinely up for deliberation.
While the panel had broad freedom in shaping how the fund will operate, its design needed to align with the Cairngorms 2030 vision, with its core themes of:
- Empower communities to shape the future of their local area
- Transform the way land is managed and used to benefit nature
- Make getting around the Cairngorms easier, safer and greener
- Foster healthier, happier communities with wellbeing at their heart
The table below summarises the areas of work and decision making required of the panel.
The fund is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, meaning there were some practical limits on what the panel could decide; funding conditions that shape what the fund can support and how it must be run. We were clear with the panel throughout about where those limits sat, so their decisions were ambitious but grounded in what was actually possible.
As an organisation we’ve worked alongside communities since the National Park was formed, but we’d never done anything like this before.
The Cairngorms National Park Authority turned the panel’s recommendations into an implementation plan, and the £1 million Cairngorms 2030 Communities Fund was launched in August 2026.
Will it make a better fund?
This is a learning process for the Park Authority and for the Co-design panel. We won’t know if it has been ‘better’ until members of the Cairngorms community get involved in applying for funding. We also don’t know what aspects will be better and what is missing. The Park Authority has already been recording learning in the form of an evaluation of the process, and they are committed to learning through the process of delivery too. The Co-design process and outcomes will be shared widely so that other funders can learn from the successes and challenges for future funds.
A report from Involve on the overall process can be found below.
The Park Authorities implementation plan can be found here.