Blackpool FC Community Trust column: Our work has been a real team effort

I’ve talked a lot over the past weeks of all the great work and response to the current situation the Community Trust has been doing, but what has gone unnoticed is the support we have received in this period from the football club to support our community.
Blackpool's players have done their bit during society's lockdownBlackpool's players have done their bit during society's lockdown
Blackpool's players have done their bit during society's lockdown

Between our club’s owner, club staff, Trust staff and first-team players, we have called vulnerable and self-isolating supporters, project participants and residents in need of a boost and to check on their welfare, as well as young children missing out on birthday parties. We have made in excess of 600 calls in this period.

We have also utilised our first-team players to put out key government and health messaging to reach key demographics through football.

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The players have also developed fitness activity videos, encouraging people to keep active indoors, which have worked perfectly alongside the Trust videos for local schools and families, making sure we keep all engaged, motivated and challenged.

As part of our community food and wellbeing hub the club has made significant donations to the food packs we send out each week.

They have donated all the drinks, crisps and chocolate that had been purchased for use in the concourses on matchdays for the rest of this season.

It’s added some treats to the packs provided by Blackpool Council’s ‘Corona Kindness’ programme.

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They also donated 500 Easter eggs which had been purchased for sale in the club shop but were added to our packs and the foodbank currently being coordinated at Blackpool Tower by Merlin.

We were also able to give 50 BFC-branded footballs to Blackpool Council’s Youth Services.

The request was made to me to help with young lads who were playing football in the park. The hope was that giving them a football each would keep them in the homes and gardens and safe.

Players have also been engaging with young supporters by challenging them to games of FIFA 20.

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The Trust has worked alongside the Premier League in something similar for our ‘Kicks’ participants.

For safeguarding reasons we are not allowed to give out any further details, but I wanted to highlight another way we have been active in this period.

While there are also other things we and the club have been doing to support the community, I wanted to highlight how closely we are now working and how great it is to work hand in hand with the football club, as one, in this new era.

My attention now turns to trying to work out where our charity sits within the new 50-page road map to recovery document the government has released and how, or if, we can start to bring some of our services back to delivery in person.

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We are now working with local schools to understand how they will return some of their pupils and have now offered our services to all our partner primary and secondary schools.

Ironically we launched two brand new mental health projects this year; ‘Unstoppable’, which uses Dan Friedman’s book to look at key issues for children in year six to cope with the transition from primary to secondary school, relationships at home and issues in their community.

This becomes even more important in the current time, so we are developing two ways to restart our delivery of this project.

If schools are comfortable with us visiting, using appropriate physical distancing, staying aware and using PPE, we will deliver in the classes.

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If not, we are developing a new digital offer that could see us deliver the session virtually from the stadium and link into the classrooms’ smartboards.

The other programme is ‘PL Inspires’, which works with Year 10 pupils to support them in preparing for their GCSE exams by giving them the preparation tools, making them aware of the local Headstart Revolution Framework for mental health and also activities and experiences to help them on their way with revision and many other topics.

Again we are talking to schools about which of the two ways they would like us to deliver to the year groups that are returning to school first.

We have also offered our services to support the schools with their PE delivery and development of teachers’ delivery of the subject.

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With regards to our own education programmes, most of our BTEC Sports College students have continued to work throughout the pandemic and will complete their academic year in June, so they will get the summer off and won’t have the need to return to physical classes until September.

Our Traineeship team will begin preparation for a new summer cohort, to hopefully start in July, but our NCS team have to wait until 2021 in being able to deliver their full programme that includes residential trips.

We are working closely with partners though to develop a safer, local offer for the autumn programme we usually deliver.

The area that is causing us the most concern is our community programmes – most are based on bringing groups together to socialise and engage in physical activity.

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I doubt it will be any time in the near future that we can bring our walking footballers, disability players and Kicks participants back to play games of football, so we are looking at how we can adapt our provision to still have some engagement at some point.

We’ll keep you all posted as soon as we have worked all this out, but be rest assured, we are working tirelessly to bring back our support, while making sure we keep our participants and staff safe.