Beyond Sport Foundation Spotlight: Everton in the Community
With Beyond Sport United and the Global Awards now just over 2 months away, we’re taking a 10th anniversary look back at some of our past winners, and how they have progressed with the support of Beyond Sport and our Foundation.
We have been supporting organisations for many years that use sport to improve health and wellbeing in their communities. The English sport for social change group, Everton in the Community, is one of those organisations.
The community wing of the Premier League’s Everton Football Club is one of the UK’s most celebrated sporting charities. Since its founding in 1988, the organisation has conducted hundreds of projects, all with the aim of “supporting the most vulnerable and underprivileged members of local communities” across greater Liverpool where they operate.
Last year, Everton in the Community (EITC) won our Sport for Health and Wellbeing Award for their “Imagine Your Goals (IYG)” program. IYG uses the power of football as a vehicle to positively address mental illness by raising awareness and challenging societal stigma. Using football as a therapeutic tool, the programme adopts a holistic approach to supporting individual’s overall health and wellbeing by building resilience and creating tangible support networks to combat loneliness and isolation to aid on-going recovery.
IYG delivers seven football therapy sessions per week, covering a broad geographical footprint of Merseyside and has done so since 2007. The programme engages over 200 participants weekly, 77% of whom the session is the only sporting activity available to them. These football therapy sessions are coupled with mental wellbeing education and personal development workshops.
Winning the Beyond Sport Award has enabled Everton in the Community to enlarge its vision of significantly impacting men’s health and wellbeing within Merseyside, one of the most socially deprived boroughs in the UK. The Award, along with the financial and business support, has allowed EITC to pursue extension projects that they have been formulating for a number of years, but didn’t have the necessary resources to implement.
One such extension project is the ‘Wise Tongue Barber Shop’, a barber training school where seven IYG participants have been recruited as trainees pursuing NVQ Level 2 barbering qualification at Knowsley Community College. The money received from Beyond Sport Foundation has been spent on college course fees, barbering equipment and specialist health and wellbeing training.
If the Global Goals are achieved, it would mean an end to extreme poverty, inequality and climate change by 2030. Beyond Sport believes that using sport is an effective and game-changing approach to make this happen.
From September 12 - 13, we’ll hold our 2018 Beyond Sport United and Global Awards in New York City. Join us to hear directly from more organizations who are using sport to drive social change in communities across the globe -- all with a special focus on youth engagement, leadership and social. We’ll be awarding up to $350,000 to the most innovative projects using sports to address the UN SDGs, so don’t miss your chance to see who wins this year’s awards!
Visit our website to so secure your spot today!