This Girl Can

We applied to this fund because we wanted to respond to several different needs that we had identified in our local community regarding women being able to access sport. This included reaching members of our community who would not usually attend our gym and well as better serving those who wanted to increase their participation.

Now that we are over half way through delivering this multifaceted project we wanted to give an update on how this grant has been used.

We are working with our local Social Prescribing team to offer 1-2-1 assistance to local women to help them take part in sport and then signposting them to our group classes. Social prescribing enables GPs to refer people to a range of local, non-clinical services to support their health and wellbeing.

We are working with the St Augustine Centre, who offer support to refugees and people seeking asylum, by providing a weekly Boxercise class to the women who use their services.

We introduced a weekly Trans & Non-Binary Boxing Class offering a safe space for an under served part of our local community to exercise and socialise, a session we plan to continue to offer as part of our regular timetable.

We ran dedicated "Intro to Fitness" courses to help any women in our local community access our classes, especially those who had been adversely effected by the pandemic and were finding it difficult to take part in fitness sessions.

Our "Buddy Up" initiative enables our members to bring a friend to a class for free as we all know that training with a friend is a great way to catch up and spend some time together therefore making exercise more fun, more accessible and less daunting.

The fund has also been responsible for helping us offer our winter "Power Up Challenge" designed to help our existing members increase how often they train and improve their own fitness through a series of 5 challenges measured over an 8 week period.

In early 2022, we will be offering a series of well being workshops that look at women related topics such as the Menopause, Pelvic Floor Health, Body Image and Self Protection. These will be part funded through This Girl Can and open to any local women.

There is no way that we could undertake such a variety of work without the help of initiatives such as This Girl Can. We were awarded £8,884 and we hope you will agree we have worked our hardest to stretch this fund to reach as many people as possible.

Thanks to Sport England and The National Lottery players for making funds like This Girl Can possible.

Thank you to our Coaches, Volunteers and Directors who help bring these projects together for Northern Powerhouse Boxing Academy.