In the Świetlica Akwarium project the volunteers renovated the dayroom (called the Aquarium) in one of Warsaw’s schools and equipped it with toys. The dayroom was painted in child-friendly colours and according to their ideas. Additionally new seats appeared in the Aquarium for children to sit on while waiting for activities. Also board and floor games were bought to develop children’s eye-hand-hearing coordination. After the paint job was done games were arranged for the bank’s employees, parents, children and school staff. The project was financed entirely with the grant from Bank Millennium Foundation.

Employees of Bank Millennium can submit following projects for Bank Millennium Foundation’s grant competition: financial education, entrepreneurship development, inter-generation projects and projects for children and the youth, support for persons threatened with social exclusion and environmental protection. Projects involving many volunteers, benefiting the highest number of people and which will have a lasting impact on the life of local communities have biggest chances of winning support.

So far Bank Millennium has had several volunteering programmes targeted mainly at supporting disabled artists and providing financial education. Employees also organised charity actions for children in need. At the same time we were receiving signals that also organisations from smaller townships need support. We wanted to give employees from all Poland the opportunity to design their own action best addressing the needs of the local organisations or persons. Hence the idea emerged of conducting a grant competition for implementation of volunteering programmes where you can decide yourself how and whom to help – Iwona Jarzębska, Chairman of Bank Millennium Foundation explained.

Apart from financial and cultural education the employee volunteering programme is one of the pillars of activity of Bank Millennium Foundation.

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