Million Minutes at CYMFed

700 people who care passionately about young people gathered from all over the UK and beyond over the weekend at the 2011 CYMFed Youth Congress in London. So where better to take the amazing Million Minutes message?

We showcased our brand new video (see it here) and Julia from St Vincent's (and see more of them here) spoke about a young lad she met through her work who she knew would benefit from Million Minutes. Finally, Million Minutes Trustee Danny said a few words about how it all works (and if you still don't know, check it out here).

If each person in the room stayed silent for 24 hours, we'd reach the Million Minutes target, which was a sobering and amazing thought! So we'll wait and see. Meanwhile, don't leave it to them! Sign up to stay silent here!

New Resources Avaliable!

We've been working hard on some new resources and updating others to help you do all you can to get involved! We have some more in depth info on the benefits of silence from Fr Christopher Jamison OSB and Delia Smith along with loads of activities and ideas for individual and group fundraising. We’ve got a couple of things which should help you tell everyone about the great things you’re doing! Most of these are in the two packs, the participant pack and the spread the word pack, but not all of them. Head over to our Resources page to have a look!

St Vincent's, Whitstable, get creative for Million Minutes

The amazing team at St Vincent's Youth Retreat Centre in Whitstable have been getting creative, looking at how to get young people going to their centre involved in Million Minutes. Not only have they been baking Million Minutes biscuits but they have put up a fantastic display on one of their notice boards to track their progress! Here is what they've said:

Southwark Catholic Youth Service and St Vincent’s Centre are supporting Million Minutes and are getting ready for the big ‘be quiet’ in a variety of ways.

In the common room of our retreat centre we now have a board devoted to raising awareness and money for our Million Minutes pledge.

As well as helping us to track the money we have raised, it also has space for the visitors to our centre, old and young alike, to write their pledges and take information and resources away on how to get involved. Our hope is that every school and parish group that join us over the coming months will take away an action pack and join in the big silence with us!

We will also be going into the parish of Whitstable once Lent has begun and are hoping to get more people involved. We’ve been practising our baking skills, pledging a Million Minute biscuit for every pledge in the parish we get.

Our community at St Vincent’s are very proud to be supporting such an exciting initiative, although we are all slightly nervous. As a group who struggle to be quiet at the best of times and who are quite attached to our facebook accounts and mobiles, we know it won’t be easy! Let’s just hope that lots of people will join us on the 8th of May when we will be silent for 24 hours.

Thanks for all your hard work! We can't wait to hear more about your progress and have a taste of the Million Minutes biscuits!

We launched!

Thanks to the more than 130 young people, Champions, clergy, church colleagues, parishioners, friends and assorted hangers on who came to the MM launch last night. What a brilliant event! Our Champions said some inspirational words and it was great to see so many people who care so much about young people. As part of the eventing we got people to pledge to stay silent. We were bowled over by the response: 378,720 minutes already! We're more than a third of the way to our million minutes target. So thanks to everyone who pledged - we'll be getting in touch with you all to make sure you heave everything you need to make a splash!

So it's game on for MM now - we have another 700,000 minutes to go, so don't forget to sign up or get someone else to! Thanks again to everyone for coming - we can do it!

1140079: our new lucky number

So, after a great deal of effort, this is it. It doesn’t look like much but it really is. It’s our brand new charity number, and we’re very pleased with it. In a very practical way, it means we can set up our online giving portal, we can print resources, and we can get letterheads and business cards. So far so boring. But it also means that our mission has been recognised as being expressly charitable: “We see a world in which young people make a difference, where they are the difference. Where they enable the transformation needed for everyone to live a life of dignity. Million Minutes campaigns with young people, raises money, and funds youth action and advocacy activities that give voice and support to young people to transform society, inspired by Catholic social teaching”

It might just seem like a hoop we had to jump through, but from where we’re standing, it’s one of the major hurdles we had to get over in order to make the Million Minutes magic happen. It opens the door to a great deal more work, but I reckon it’s a great start.

Growing up fast

Silence keeps inspiring us. We wrote off to register the charitable company this week, with Stephen Davies and Nicky Pisa who are joining us on the Board. Terribly grown up! And all you tech-heads out there, we bought some other domains (not the .com one, though - it's advertising games in America, apparently), so we'll be secure in our silent online home.

Last up in our little tour of recent activity, we've commissioned a very able young fellow to snaz the site up, we've asked two people to join us as Champions (both famous in their own ways), and got randomly festive at the thought of Christmas.

And we planned the launch - January 31th (the feast of St Don Bosco, the patron saint of young people). Put it in your diary. So it's all hands on deck, frankly.