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• Message from the CEO
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• The Great Generation Team
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The last four years has seen The Great Generation develop in to a unique and thriving network of diverse partners committed to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

Our strategic review during 2008 has led to an improved development framework for our local partners in the form of a consultation that delivers a 3 – 5 year vision for the partnership. It is this vision that drives all volunteer projects for the community, and as we aimed from the outset, ensures all our projects address needs highlighted by the community. As ever this work remains a delicate balance between offering the opportunity for innovation and change and answering the needs of extremely vulnerable people.

Our volunteer projects now offer two types of solution to needs that exist because of poverty: Capacity Building and Community Development Projects. The capacity building projects offer the local NGOs and CBOs that provide services to communities in need the opportunity to improve their organisational planning and impact. The community development projects focus on the people in those communities and their environment, and add or improve facilities, or launch new initiatives to help that community develop responses and solutions to its needs.

The organisation has become a vehicle for individuals, communities, companies, schools, NGOs and governments with the interest and the will to apply knowledge and skills, and be part of finding solutions that can bring about lasting change to communities trapped by poverty.

The last year has seen the launch of our education programme supported by our partners V charity, LDC and International Agenda. The aim of the programme is to offer young people studying at sixth form level, university or post graduate education the opportunity to volunteer. For many it has been a life changing experience.

We have welcomed on board a new strategic partner in Salesforce.com and its foundation who will work with us through their unique 1% programme to deliver volunteers, product and funding. The Salesforce.com platform will become a critical pillar in our microfinance plan and will enable our partners on the ground to manage funds more effectively.

What has all this achieved? Almost £30,000 put to work through microfinance, over 20,000 lives have been touched and improved, approx £120,000 of consulting value delivered through our volunteers' work, £10,000 granted to community infrastructure through 14 partners and 123 volunteers.

Where do we go next? Against a backdrop of a shifting economic landscape and global instability it would be easy to choose the “not sure” or “difficult to say” option. However that is not the premise upon which The Great Generation was founded and it is certainly not the option that the One Billion people who live on less than a $1 per day can choose.

Our goals over the next 3 – 5 years remain and the changes that have been thrust upon us and the rest of the world, in our view, offer many new opportunities, and certainly more opportunities than barriers, to continue to build the most effective network working towards the Millennium Development Goals. Volunteers and partners may emerge from new parts of the landscape but what will not change are the people seeking solutions to the needs thrust upon them by poverty, and where that need exists The Great Generation can be a catalyst to bring about action, lasting change and truly unlock the agency of the individual.