History of Solent Youth Action

Solent Youth Action began life in 1999 as the Eastleigh Millennium Volunteers project - delivering the national Government youth volunteering initiative in the Eastleigh area from Eastleigh Community Services.

We identified limitations in the Millennium Volunteers (MV) programme - demands for youth volunteering that it could not meet, and groups of young people that it couldn't effectively reach. We identified ways to address these by expanding on MV with complimentary projects. Continuing as a project within Eastleigh Community Services (ECS) we developed these ideas into a number of pilot youth volunteering schemes.

We grew and refined these pilot projects over time, until we reached a point where they became as significant a part of our work as delivering the MV contract. We set up Solent Youth Action as an independent organisation in it's own right to turn the pilots into full projects. We registered as a charity and a company limited by guarantee in 2005, and on 31st March 2006 Solent Youth Action became an independent organisation.

The projects continued to grow and develop, and were added to with new pilot schemes. We quickly established ourselves as an effective deliverer and innovator in this work, and started to take local leadership and coordination roles in the development of youth volunteering. The most significant example of this was being the lead agency in the consortium bids for funding from V. We are continuing to coordinate the delivery of this work with our partner agencies from across the South West.

The development of new projects and initiatives led us not only into new activities, but also to expand our geographic reach. From a small organisation operating only in Eastleigh town, we are now working across the whole of Hampshire, Southampton and the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth, opening new offices in Chandler's Ford, Southampton, Portsmouth, and Newport Colle on the I.O.W.

More recently, we moved out of our office in 1 Community (formerly Eastleigh Community Services) into a new head office in Eastleigh - our own three-storey building in Warwick Court on Leigh Road, giving us more space to grow at an exciting phase in our development.