The times are changing for Millennium Volunteers. How and when isn’t exactly clear. How long it will be around in it’s current form is something that we’ve been talking about this evening.
Probably best to start with a little background. Millennium Volunteers, or MV, is a national government initiative which aims to get young people into volunteering. MV provides nationally accepted recognition for volunteer work done by young people, through Award Of Excellence certificates signed by a government minister. The vision is for young people to gain experience and skills while making a positive contribution to their communities.
In each town or area, MV can be delivered differently, by a different type of organisation – in almost a franchise-type way. I’ve seen MV projects run by organisations from the voluntary sector, the local government sector, and further and higher education sectors. They all sign contracts to provide MV (promising to meet certain targets like number of young people, quality of service, etc.) on behalf of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). In return, they get funding and benefits like the use of the national brand.
Why do I care? Well, my organisation runs one of the 160 (?) MV projects. Although it’s not the only project that we run, it was how we started and still provides the biggest chunk of our funding. Changes to MV could have a big impact on our work, so I watch it with interest.
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I wrote it to run in the background, and update itself once a minute. This raised an interesting question – what to do with the handle to Outlook.