I play the lottery every week in the hope of being able to buy my dream home. Once I won £10, which was quite exciting. But then I lost the ticket, which was less so.

An awful lot of that lottery money, of course, doesn’t go into players’ pockets – it goes to helping people as well.

Village SOS is a brand new National Lottery initiative which gives you the chance to give your village its very own makeover. And we’re not talking a coat of paint and a bit of a tidy here.

Anything up to £400,000 could go towards helping make your village a lovely  – or even lovelier! – place to live and visit.

And you could end up on the telly, too. The lottery scheme is teaming up with the BBC for a series next year. The Beeb feel that people are at the heart of a village community so they’ll be following the activities of residents in the six chosen villages next year.

Want to nominate your village? Well, you’ve got to be sure it has less than 3,000 people in it first (any town records should be able to tell you this – you don’t have to line everyone up and count them!)

You’ve got until August 14th to apply, but you won’t find out until May 2010 whether or not you’ve been accepted.

It might be worth starting up a couple of community projects before you apply, though, so the judges can see that you’re at least making an effort on your own. Besides, that community garden might be fun if everyone chips in.

And that’s the whole point, really -  to get everyone working together and making a happy, safe place for people to live.

If you’re planning to apply (or if you’ve been quick off the mark and applied already!) let us know. We’d love to find out more about who is getting involved. We might even pop round and see your village!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.