UnLimited delay

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By Alex Klaushofer

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The launch of UnLimited, the successor scheme to the Millennium Commission’s Millennium Awards, has been delayed until mid 2002.
The consortium of seven not-for-profit organisations, including Community Action Network and Comic Relief, is to manage an endowment fund of £100m, generating an estimated £4.5m a year for small grants to individual social entrepreneurs. No firm date has been set for the launch of the new organisation, which was originally scheduled to be up and running by September this year. Erica Roberts, who as the Millennium Commission’s Awards Director is responsible for coaxing UnLimited into existence, attributed the delay to the difficulties of recruiting its chief executive. She said that the appointment of social entrepreneur Rosalind Copisarow had taken about six months, reflecting ‘just the nature of the market’. She added that UnLimited’s trustees had been ‘slightly optimistic’ about the length of time the process would take.

Copisarow, who started work in September, has been overseeing the development of UnLimited’s infrastructure. A London office has been opened and key management staff appointed. The organisation is seeking staff to fill two posts in each country and the nine English regions. Copisarow brings with her Street UK, the micro-credit organisation she founded, which is to become a subsidiary of UnLimited next year. Roberts stressed that the longer timescale is also a result of the extensive grant-making policies and systems that the Millennium Commission has required UnLimited to establish. The consortium still only holds the status of ‘preferred bidder’. ‘We’re asking them to exist and demonstrate that their systems work,’ she said. ‘There needs to be a very rigorous fitness for purpose to assure the Commission that UnLimited is a safe pair of hands and a worthy recipient of public funds.’ On current plans, UnLimited will submit a final bid to the Millennium Commission in February. If approved, a signing-off process involving the DCMS, the Treasury and the National Audit Office will follow. This, according to Michael Norton, executive chairman of Changemakers, one of UnLimited’s seven partners, will take about three months. UnLimited will then be launched initially in selected regions, and then nationwide.
Norton added: ‘There’s nothing at all sinister about the delay other than very unrealistic thoughts about building the organisation.’ In the meantime those hoping to tap into the new social entrepreneurship culture are eagerly awaiting the birth of the new charity. Mike Wilkins, Director of Awards for All England, said, ‘Clearly there is a case for us to get talking to each other. We’re waiting for them to sort themselves out.’