Team v

What it was

Team v was the vInspired charity’s leadership programme. It launched in 2011. Each year about forty young people aged 18 to 25 were recruited as Team v leaders across England, trained, and then ran three national campaigns in a row in their own communities over roughly nine months, recruiting volunteers around them. A leader who completed the year received a scholarship of up to £1,000. The programme was evaluated independently by CFE, with young people trained as peer researchers to take part in the evaluation.

What it did

The first campaign, on food poverty, ran over Christmas: 308 volunteers and 106 partner organisations collected more than 20,500 food items for several thousand people, and the campaign got a push in Parliament. The second, on loneliness, ran from January to March with the Beth Johnson Foundation: 220 volunteers reached 859 older people. The third worked on child literacy at Key Stage 2. In its second year the campaigns included Make Time For Your Mind, and the programme added alumni mentors and a longer lead-in before the campaigns began. The emerging findings from the evaluation were positive, and the leaders’ own accounts are the best record of what the year did for them.

From the archive

• Team v is empowering young people to improve their communities
• Team v’s food poverty campaign gets a parliamentary push
• Team v campaign two: combating loneliness together
• Our Team v leaders have done it again: the launch of campaign three
• Emerging findings show Team v has had positive impact
• Learning through evaluation on Team v
• Why becoming a Team v leader could be the best thing you ever do
• Five inspirational quotes from our Team v leaders

Coverage

• HuffPost UK, July 2015: Hope is a special but fragile thing, a Team v leader’s own account of a session in London

What happened

Team v ended with the charity in November 2018. Former leaders still link to it from their own writing, which is why this page exists. If you were a Team v leader and need to show what you did, the archive posts above are the public record.