Last week was the final week of the Friday, 3pm to 6pm sessions put on at Queen’s Park after four weeks of different themes, to help engage with the youth of Chesterfield and cut anti-social behaviour.
The final week was specially partnered with the Chesterfield FC academy, as a number of the academy players visited Queen’s Park to run some football skills sessions for people to get involved with, free of charge.
Rebecca White, who has been in charge of running the project, was delighted with how it went. She said: “We’ve had the youth team down, they’ve put on a football session for people in the park to just come down and get involved with.
“It’s been fantastic, I’m so proud of the boys – they’ve done a brilliant job. They’ve been great.
“We’ve had kids sat waiting for the session to start, which shows that people were interested in the session and it’s fair to say lots of people turned up.”
Rebecca also spoke about the importance of funding received to enable the project to go ahead.
“We’ve been so lucky to get funding from the Police Crime Commissioner’s fund to set up this project,” she said. “It wouldn’t be possible without that money..
“We’ve used it to set up our extra sessions on Friday evenings, which has been great. It’s an extension to our successful ‘Boots on Ground’ project that we already do with the youth.
“The funding is massively important; without it we simply wouldn’t be able to run these projects and projects like this are vital to the community.”
Rebecca also explained why she feels it’s so important that the sessions are free of charge, adding: “A lot of people just simply can’t afford these sorts of sessions for their kids, they just can’t do it.
“It’s so expensive in the school holidays to keep kids entertained. It’s vitally important that as a Community Trust we provide children – and more importantly the parents – with an opportunity to attend these sorts of sessions at no cost.
“The kids can come, get involved, have drinks and snacks and have lots of fun. Everything we provide is free and that’s important to us.”
Rebecca said that she would welcome doing future projects involving the academy, saying: “Absolutely, we’d love to get the academy involved more.
“We’re looking to do more of these sorts of things in the future. If we receive funding then we’re always happy to run sessions like this.
“It’s so important to us. We just need everyone to follow us on social media so we can increase the reach on these sorts of things.
“Get involved and follow us on Facebook and Twitter and head to our website, there’s always stuff going on.
“All of our news goes out on there first so that’s your best way of getting involved and finding out about the stuff we do!”
The Community Trust would like to thank the Police Crime Commissioner for funding for this project.
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