Nearly There!
Across the country people are preparing for their silence, activity on our online fundraising site BMyCharity.com is increasing rapidly and we’re hearing so many more stories about peoples plans, what they’re doing to make the most of the fundraising opportunity along with their hopes, fears and expectations for their silence. Here is a selection of the stories we’re hearing:
- In Fife we’ve heard about a scout group preparing to stay silent and anxious that they’ll make it the whole way through
- In Bolton all of the young adult group from the Schoenstatt Shrine will be meeting at the shrine to stay silent throughout the day
- In Warrington St. Gregory’s chaplaincy group is doing all they to spread the word throughout the school
- In Macclesfield the team at Savio House Retreat Centre and a group training to volunteer overseas with Bosco Volunteer Action (BOVA) are staying silent together even though the BOVA group have never met each other (never mind the Savio team) before!
- In Millwall some of the young parishioners of St. Edmond’s parish have signs ready to explain why they are silent at Mass on Sunday
- All 24 of St. Mary’s Impact group, west Croydon, are staying silent to make up 24 hours and will be making sure everybody in the Parish knows about it!
- The team from St. Vincent's Centre (of Southwark Youth Service) are ALL staying totally silent for 24 hours!
Want to make sure everybody know what you're doing for Million Minutes? We have an image ready that you can use as your profile picture on facebook or twitter (or anything else you like!). you can find it here, and all you need to do is just save it onto your computer and upload it as a new profile picture, easy!
For those of you who are anxious about you’re silence, we have two new resources which offer you practical tips for managing to stay silent for a whole 24 hours, one is from Sr Gabriel Davison (from BBC2’s The Concent) and the other is from a friend of Million Minutes, Matthew van Duyvenbode. Find them here and here, and as with many other fantastic things they are on our resources page here.
An Invitation from Margaret Mizen:
- “During Million Minutes, on Sunday 8 May, I am walking in silence from St Paul’s Cathedral to Westminster Cathedral.”
Are you still to make plans for your silence? Why not come to walk with Margaret Mizen from St. Pauls Cathedral to Westminster Cathedral in silence? This is a great opportunity to stand (and walk!) in solidarity with not only Margaret Mizen and everyone else staying silent, but also all of those People are meeting outside St. Pauls at 12.45 to start walking at 1, the walk should take about 2 hours. It would be fantastic to see you there!
The best of luck to everyone staying silent on Sunday, we look forward to hearing about your experiences!
Savio House and Million Minutes
The team from Savio House Salesian Retreat Centre have started their preparation for their ‘big silence’, which is now less than a month away! The chart you can see them holding below is to keep track of their fundraising from friends and family, and to keep track of when each team member is going to be silent.
Alongside a period of communal silence, different team members will be silent for set periods of time in the week prior to the 8th of May as a form of witness. This will help to show the benefits of silence to the young people who come to Savio House alongside raising some money for a great cause.
If you want to support the Savio House team’s fantastic efforts you can offer words of support on their facebook page!
Million Minutes Interns
Million Minutes has been growing and growing since it launched and has recently taken on two interns who are keen to do all they can for youth dignity. Christine Sterlini and Chris Knowles (pictured below) have experience working with young people before, Christine volunteering at Manzini Youth Care, an orphanage in Swaziland and Chris at Savio House, a Salesian Retreat Centre near Macclesfield.
Christine, who has recently returned from her stint volunteering with overseas volunteer organization BOVA said that “it is really exciting being able to be part of such a great new venture”, “I was really keen to do something for young people on returning from Swaziland, and this has been a great opportunity”. Chris who currently finishing his Christian Theology MA at Heythrop College said that “Million Minutes is a great idea at a time when the young can easily get forgotten, I would urge anyone interested in helping the young of today to get involved”.
Head over to the Get Involved page to see what you can do!
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!
Million Minutes Video
In this video we explore why silence is a great way to to stand up for, and raise money for, young people. With Fr Christopher Jamison OSB, Margaret Mizen and Paschal Uche.
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!
Million Minutes Launch Press Release
To see our launch press release, please follow this link.
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.
This is Million Minutes
Kicking off our online presence!
Hi there! Thanks for stopping by. This website is a bit of a work-in-progress, but we're super excited about kicking off our online presence here. We'll be adding photos, names, ways to get in touch, basically everything any self-respecting website needs. So, comment below, recommend, add us to your favourites, and just watch out. Million Minutes is not a million miles away anymore.