Lucy Carter

Tuesday of this week we held the annual OPAL Conference at the Natural History Museum.  It's a great opportunity for all the staff who work on OPAL (over 100 of us!) to get together and find out about each others' work over the past year.  We also invite representatives from some of the other organisations and communities that we work with through OPAL so they can find out more about the project.  This year we invited all the natural history groups who have received grants through the OPAL Grants Scheme.  It was great to finally meet some of these people and put faces to the names I've been emailing over the past year or so!

We got great feedback from the conference - it's always inspiring to hear about the impact of the project and it was brilliant to have the Earl of Selbourne there to support our work too.

It's getting close to the end of the OPAL year now (our funding years run December - November) so we're busy writing up reports of our achievements over the past year to feed back to the Big Lottery Fund who support OPAL.  At the same time I'm collecting in the end of project reports from the first group of natural history societies that received funding through the OPAL Grants Scheme.  It's been a great success with 11 groups increasing their membership by 10% or more, and lots of other groups reporting that the funding has really helped their group to improve the way it works and reach out to more people in their local area.

The final round of the Grants Scheme has just opened to applications, so if you belong to a natural history group, please encourage them to have a look at the funding pages of the OPAL website to see if they can apply!