Posted by Geraldine Pearce
on 8/6/2009, 4:38 pm
Message modified by board administrator 8/6/2009, 4:54 pm
Village SOS, a partnership between the BBC and the Big Lottery Fund (BIG), will challenge villages to come up with brilliant ideas for new businesses to help revive their communities, many of which are seeing rural life eroded by economic pressures and the closure of local amenities. Village SOS will invite rural communities with lots of enthusiasm and a great business idea - from retailing to manufacturing, the arts to leisure - to apply for Lottery funding to help breathe new life into their area, create new jobs and improve the quality of life for local people.
Eighteen villages will be shortlisted to receive a development grant of up to £10,000, and will choose an enterprising 'Village Champion' to work with to advance their ideas. In May 2010 six of these projects will then be awarded Lottery funding of up to £400,000 each and their respective Village Champions will move into the villages for a year to help them turn their business idea into a reality. BIG will be searching for the villages and will fund the community-owned rural businesses for their first year. During this time they will be filmed for a prime time BBC One series set to air in Winter 2010, presented by successful Bombay Bicycle Club entrepreneur Sarah Wilmingham. The Village Champions will be recruited through a nationwide search run jointly by the BBC and Make Your Mark. We want to share our excitement about the value that entrepreneurial people can bring to places, and as the people who run the Enterprising Britain competition on behalf of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform we know more than most what that value can be.
So, we're helping with the selection process and are hoping that lots of enterprising people - from entrepreneurs through to successful project managers and community activists - will apply. The six funded villages will choose a Village Champion who will go and live in that village for a year and get paid £30,000. So if you are looking for a challenge and have always wondered what rural life might be like, why not apply? Deadline for both villages and Village Champions to apply is 14 August.
Next steps
Further information can be found online or requested from Make Your Mark
• Link to www.makeyourmark.org.uk/villagesos which outlines our involvement and signposts to the BBC site
www.bbc.co.uk/villagesos for the Village Champions application form and to the BIG site
www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/villagesos for village applications. The BIG site also has web banners which you can use on your own website
• Please tag comments on Twitter feeds with #villagesos, and join the debate at @makeyourmark
• You could also write a guest blog which would appear on the Make Your Mark site, or suggest content for our Village SOS and wider Enterprising Places pages
• Let us know if you would be interested in getting involved in a BBC Learning campaign, which will accompany the TV series - likely to include website with resources including funding available for rural enterprise and outreach programme in rural communities - email hannah@makeyourmark.org.uk with learning campaign in the subject header
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