York City Football Club Foundation
York City Football Club Foundation say:
The aim of the programme was to provide free holiday provision to local young people within the Tang Hall ward. We wanted to provide it to those people who may not be able to afford to do an activity all the time due to the financial restrictions. Due to the introduction of universal credit there is more pressure on families to work and rely upon family members to provide childcare and less local authority provision. Our experience shows that families who are financially disadvantaged will not place priority on their children taking part in holiday activities, during an extended absence from school such as school holidays.
Our Holiday hunger provision is the perfect way to redress the balance as it provides fun and informal football activity sessions within a safe environment with all the psychological and physiological benefits physical activity provides which include; tackling childhood obesity, improving mental health, reducing social isolation, giving young people something to look forward to, providing positive role models.
The funding for Purey-Cust Trust helped support activities over 2 days during the February half term holidays, 2 days during the Easter holidays, and 1 day per week for the first 3 weeks of the summer holidays at Burnholme Community Hub. We chose this venue as it has great facilities and is in a great location in the Tang Hall area and is in the heart of the local community. Sessions would run from 10:00-12:00pm for ages 4-7 and 1:00-3:00pm for ages 8-13 with 30 spaces per session.
The sessions had a positive impact on the young people who were participating in them; they were positive players always playing with a smile on their face. This was demonstrated in the amount of young people we had returning to the sessions weekly. This also allowed us to build a positive rapport with the children allowing us to direct the sessions more favourably to the participants and their likes or dislikes.
We received positive feedback from the parents regarding the sessions demonstrating the impact they were having:
My boys loved it with all the different games they were playing and skills they were learning.
Parents also commented what a relief these sessions have been during the summer holidays due to how expensive they are becoming as a whole. One parent said “I would not be able to afford to more than a couple of things over the summer with my kids so these are a relief for me just to get them out of the house.
