History of Organisation

Thirty Years of Improving the Quality of Life in the North West

1974 – 2000     Merseyside Council for Voluntary Service ( MCVS )

2000 to Present - Local Solutions

The organisation was officially launched in March 1974 by Councillor Sefton, Chairman of the newly-formed - and short-lived  - Merseyside County Council. At that time our title was Merseyside Council for Voluntary Service (MCVS). There were twelve other CVS's on Merseyside and one of our tasks was to co-ordinate the work of the councils.

However, with the onset of mass unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s, MCVS  focused its efforts on initiating a range of programmes to combat poverty and provide opportunities for people to improve the quality of their lives. That continues to be our primary aim today, and we are proud to have played a part in improving the quality of life for many thousands of disadvantaged people in the region.

Towards the end of the 1990s, the expansion in our services and the change in the type of work we did meant that the name Merseyside Council for Voluntary Service had become something of a misnomer. For example, although we still used a number of volunteers in our projects, we could no longer say that we were a traditional CVS. Our customers and service users were by then individuals, families and groups who were deriving benefit from our training programmes, welfare rights advice, security measures and energy efficiency installations, childcare, health and disability services, domiciliary care and sports and leisure facilities..

Another significant reason for changing our name was that although we saw Merseyside as our home -not least because our headquarters are situated in Liverpool - we were increasingly operating in a wider area of the North West of England, and felt that our name should reflect this extension of our work area.

Following consultation with stakeholders, staff and our Governing Board, it was agreed that the advent of the new millennium provided an ideal opportunity for us to change our name and so, at the Public General meeting held in the autumn of 2000 MCVS became LOCAL SOLUTIONS.