The Millennium Commission Grants database PROFESA provides details of grants awarded to all the organisations supported through the Millennium Awards Scheme, which allowed individual people to benefit directly from a National Lottery grant; the Millennium Projects scheme; and the Millennium Festivals scheme. PROFESA contains basic information about all the awards, projects and festivals supported by the Millennium Commission, including applicant, project outline, cost, and progress.
The contents of the database were made available online. Users were able to make searches through the Millennium Commission website (http://www.millennium.gov.uk) and view summary details of projects, including images. These queries were sourced directly from the PROFESA database and its image library.
The content covers three main areas: Awards, Projects, and Festivals.
The Millennium Awards Scheme distributed small Lottery grants called Millennium Awards. Since 1996, these were awarded to individual people for projects which benefited themselves and their community.
Millennium Projects were the most visible part of the Commission's work, including large-scale buildings and environmental schemes accounting for over £1.3 billion of National Lottery money. The Millennium Commission only had enough funds to support a tenth of the applications it received. The Commission's contribution represented up to 50% of the cost of each project and the balance had to be raised by the projects. At the time of completion, there were over 215 Millennium Projects on around 3,000 sites throughout the United Kingdom.
Millennium Festivals 1999-2001: The Millennium Commission wanted to help communities celebrate the new millennium. Working with other Lottery distributors it created a Millennium Festival fund of over £100 million. The year 2000 saw over 2,000 Millennium Commission funded festivals taking place. An impact study on the Millennium Festival carried out in 2001 highlighted the positive impact of the Millennium Festival in the United Kingdom.
The datasets in this series are available to download. Links to individual datasets can be found at piece level.
The National Archives
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