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An exciting rural initiative from the BIG Lottery Fund and the BBC, challenging villages across the UK to come up with brilliant ideas for brand new businesses

Thank you for getting involved

Six successful enterprises will share up to £3 million and will work closely with a Village Champion to get their businesses up and running.

Winning Projects

After months of searching high and low across the UK for the most enterprising rural village ideas, BIG have chosen six winning village business schemes to receive Lottery funding and appear in a six-part BBC TV series next year.

Due to the high standard of the proposals we will be awarding funding to a further four of the village schemes, which will form a key part of the Village SOS Learning Campaign. The campaign will accompany the BBC series and seeks to inspire enterprising villages across the UK to take the bold step towards starting their own community business.