Skip to main content
 

Site navigation

 
Home Get Involved Trusts & Foundations The Big Lottery Fund

The Big Lottery Fund

The Big Lottery Fund (BIG) has awarded YouthNet an incredible £1,523,460 from its Building and Sustaining Infrastructure Services (BASIS) programme.

Big Lottery Fund logo
 

The grant is a contribution towards the delivery of a five-year strategic project that will support a step-change in volunteering and ensure the sustainability of the infrastructure. With BIG's support, we will continue to enhance the National Volunteering Database. This is the electronic infrastructure that not only sits under YouthNet's public-facing website, do-it.org.uk, but also powers many other websites through which users can search and register for opportunities to volunteer.

The grant will also help to:

  • Support volunteer-involving organisations to act faster and communicate more effectively with volunteers;
  • Improve their knowledge and skills in the use of technology for volunteer recruitment and management;
  • Increase opportunities for them to influence volunteering policy.

In this way, we will enhance the volunteer experience, encourage more people to volunteer and increase loyalty and commitment to civic engagement.

"We are extremely grateful to the Big Lottery Fund for such a fantastic award, which will enable us to support many organisations in the voluntary and community sector to involve volunteers in their work," Fiona Dawe, Chief Executive, YouthNet.

YouthNet has been working in partnership with the Big Lottery Fund since 2002 when they  awarded major support for the pilot of our askTheSite service, enabling us to create and develop the best possible tailored question and answer service for young people. Since then, BIG has continued to help YouthNet keep up with the times and lead the sector into the future. In 2005, a development grant of £500,000 over three years was awarded towards extending TheSite.org services onto mobile phones, and training young people to become online peer advisors. The Big Lottery Fund's major investment in this work is enabling YouthNet to support the UK's young people in groundbreaking ways – helping us to provide the very best advice and information, and to train young people to help each other.