Virgin Unite have asked us to partner with them on a fantastic programme for small youth-focussed charities.  Throughout the year we work with different partners across lots of fundraising events – so keep an eye on the FSI Community for more details.  If you’re a youth-focussed charity then read on…

You may be aware that Virgin Money sponsor the London Marathon. This year Virgin’s foundation ‘Virgin Unite’ are launching a campaign to help 100 small UK youth focused charities that have not previously had access to a Gold or Silver bond running place the opportunity to have a marathon place to help with their fundraising campaign for 2011. Virgin Unite plan to give 100 small youth charities a marathon place and a ‘marathon runner’ to run the marathon and help raise money for their designated charity. Virgin Unite have set a target of £1M to raise, or £10,000 per charity. The runners will all be employees of Virgin group companies and will each be given a charity to run for and raise money for.

As they say, there is no such thing as free money! Virgin Unite are looking for entrepreneurial charities who will support their runner and help them develop and manage a fundraising campaign to raise the £10,000. The runner will bring the backing of the Virgin business he or she works for, but the charity also needs to bring contacts and lots of enthusiasm and resource to make that target.
The are no rules of how much turnover your charity makes in a year as long as you are ’small’ however Virgin Unite have confirmed that as a charity you need to be UK registered and be willing to set up a Virgin Money Giving page (Virginmoneygiving.com) as all fundraising does need to be done online.
To apply for this great programme, please send an email within the FSI community to Kim Sutton. To sign up to the FSI community, visit www.thefsi.org, click on the tab at the top of the homepage and click ‘register now’. Once you’ve joined, please send an email with Virgin Unite in the heading (within the community) to Kim Sutton together with the following details by Friday 17th September:
• charity name
• registered charity number
• geographical location and remit
• focus and activities
• contact name, position
• Tel number
• Email address

If you meet the criteria, we will put your application forth to Virgin Unite. Due to the large number of expected applications, we won’t be able to respond to each email. Once the list of charities have been forwarded to Virgin Unite, they will contact those charities they are interested in pursuing, and we expect that this will happen after 20th September. We will endeavour to get a list of these successful charities from Virgin Unite and post it on our website as soon as possible.