The Big Lottery Fund has announced the 50 additional communities which will be funded as part of its Big Local initiative.

The scheme, launched in 2010, is designed to spread funding of at least £1m over 10 years in communities which have traditionally been hard to fund. The residents in these communities are given the power to determine how the funding is spent, working in collaboration with local charities, businesses and public sector bodies.

BIG announced the first lot of 50 communities to receive the grants in the summer of 2010, and today’s announcement brings to 100 the number of communities receiving money under the scheme. BIG intends to select another final 50 communities to get money under Big Local by the end of this year.

Nat Sloane, chair of the Big Lottery Fund England, said: “Big Local is about so much more than simply awarding Lottery funding to communities. It is a very different approach to addressing need at a very local level.”