Fit for All

Aim

To continue the club's recovery from Covid we want to develop more community uses for our facilities, making us more accessible to all

A short club history

Formed in 2012, North Down Boxing and Fitness club is based in a purpose-built facility in the heart of our local community. Whilst our focus tends to be on our junior squads (under 18) we are committed to engaging with all groups, particularly girls and women, those who have been away from sport for some time and anyone from our wider community who is interested in getting and keeping fit.

At our heart, we are a boxing club. But with the support of countless organisations and individuals, over the years, we have managed to build and maintain a club with fantastic facilities and a fantastic spirit of pride in our people.

Community impact

Over the last number of years our membership has continued to grow. However, Covid-19 really slowed our progress in developing further. With boxing being one of the last sports to come out of lockdown, we lost almost two entire competition and training seasons. This deprived the club of not only vital income and the ability to recruit new members, but left our existing members 'shut out' of an activity they loved.

Some of our members did not return after lockdown and many more showed signs of anxiety, loss of motivation and difficulty enjoying the social aspect of our club.

We want to 're-introduce' the club to our wider community and encourage more people to regard the club as an essential aspect of their lives, nurturing not only a desire to live a healthy lifestyle, but become connected to our wider network.

Why are we crowdfunding?

Yes we have a beautiful facility that our members love coming to, but everyday is a real struggle just to keep the lights on and cover our energy costs. Somehow, with help from our fantastic supporters, we manage to keep our heads above water.

Unfortunately, we often find ourselves not able to develop new projects and programmes to help the club grow and offer our members more opportunities within the club. That is the reason we are asking our 'crowd' to help us fundraise.

How we’ll spend the money raised

We always feel it is vital to be transparent about how we intend  to spend the money we raise. As a charitable organisation, this is one of our core duties. through this appeal we are raising money from our community to put in place several core programmes:

1. Community Fit for Life

Promoting the wider benefits of adopting healthier habits and delivering fitter families. This would include support for:

Positive mental health outcomes through mindfulness sessions

Nutritional and dietary sessions for the entire local community

Supervised, directed physical activities

2. Specialist fitness and coaching for our boxers

This will include bespoke sessions directed towards a range of benefits - improving stamina, separate strength and speed training for delivering short, high intensity activity, and a focus on warm ups and warming down to aid injury prevention as well as focussing on tactics to speed up recovery time from injuries

3. Development of our girls and ladies roster

Female participants will be encouraged to take up boxing through introductory, non-contact techniques such as dance, yoga, boxfit, pilates, self defence etc

4. Opening our facilities to partner organisations

We are a 'community' facility, based quite literally in the heart of our community. We want everyone to be able to share our home. From seniors to mothers and toddlers, those who want light fitness and wellbeing activities to the true endorphin 'junkies' or from next world champion boxers to those who just want to shadow box, all will be welcome

How you can play your part

We know that everyone is struggling just to pay their bills during the cost of living crisis, but we are asking our members, parents, volunteers, coaches, neighbours and local businesses to make a donation to help our appeal.

Even the smallest amount will make a difference...for every £1 that is donated, Sport NI will match that amount. So our target is to raise £10,000. If we raise £5,000 ourselves, this will be matched by Sport NI up to a maximum of £5,000

There are four simple ways you can help us reach our target, and make this project a reality:

1. Make a pledge. Don’t delay if you’re going to support us because momentum is key to our success!

2. Spread the word. Share our project on your social media pages and tell the world to get behind us! The more people we reach, the more support we will get.

3. Offer rewards. Get involved if you are a local business by donating things we can offer to our supporters. We will give you a shout out!

4. If you want to run your own fundraiser to support us, maybe a sponsored activity or similar, use the 'contact project' button at the top of our page to let us know. Setting up your own page only takes a few minutes and you won’t need any bank details. Just a fun idea!

This project successfully funded on 6th December 2022