GSFC Community Building Through Football For All

Aim

Greenwell Star aim to be a source of physical activity & mental health education within the local community to promote a healthier lifestyle

Who are we?

Greenwell Star FC were formed in the summer of 1984, and we are fast approaching the milestone of our 40th anniversary. However our Club, like many others, came very close to folding when we were faced with having to deal with the COVID pandemic and the many complications that it caused. 

Throughout this troubling period our Club membership declined and when coupled with significantly reduced income from no games being played and also little to no sponsorship coming in from our supporters and local businesses who were also suffering from the effects of the COVID restrictions, all this combined to bring the Club to the brink of closure.

However, in order to keep the Club active when football was postponed indefinitely, the Committee agreed to concentrate all our efforts on charity fundraising. This saw us raise £6,000 for Ards Suicide Awareness Group and Beyond the Battlefield, £7,000 for Diabetes UK and then we helped contribute to the fundraising efforts of our Honorary Life President, Alderman James Menagh as he raised around £20,000 for Cancer Research UK and the Air Ambulance NI. 

With the Club very much thinking about the future, we approach it with a great deal of optimism. Having come through the COVID enforced difficulties we are now in a good place with membership on the increase again with over 50 registered senior players, over 50 kids involved with the youth set-up, 10 coaches working together across the various teams and a 10 strong pro-active and forward-thinking Committee. 

Committee members are currently working on a new 5 Year Strategy & Development Plan for the Club which will be directly linked to the needs and aspirations of all those who are currently engaged with the Club and with the potential to reach out to the wider community. We believe that now is a great time to launch this CrowdFunder campaign in order for us to try and garner the financial support required to achieve the objectives detailed below and help us fulfil our potential.

Community impact

Greenwell Star since its inception has been, and always will be, a community based football club with local people at the heart of it. We have always continued to function and operate due to the relationship we have built up over the years with the people of Newtownards. However, we believe that we have the personnel and capacity to offer much more to our members and the wider community.  

In recent times, particularly during the numerous enforced lockdowns, Newtownards, like other places, has seen a rise in the number of people suffering with drug and alcohol addictions, especially in the younger demographic. Anti-social behaviour amongst young people in the town is also on the increase, ranging from graffiti, underage drinking, solvent abuse and bullying. 

Our aim as a Club is to put interventions and measures in place that will help prevent these troubles and situations arising through the provision of football and physical activity and providing information, training and education on a wide range of issues and topics that will focus mainly on mental health awareness and positive lifestyle choices.

At the beginning of 2022 we started up our new venture, Greenwell Star Youth. This began with a series of coaching sessions aimed at developing basic football skills in young children born between 2015 - 2018 and encouraging them to learn how to positively interact with each other in a team environment. We have been liaising with Kyle Spiers, one of the IFA’s Regional Grassroots Development Officers, with the intention of entering a couple of teams into the IFA's small sided games. And we have recently had our new under 11's 9-a-side team accepted into the South Belfast Youth League.

We see this as a long-term investment and we hope by introducing more and more youth teams throughout various ages ranges, it will allow the kids to remain at the Club as we continue to help them develop and eventually see them make their way into our senior sides in years to come.  

We also have a significant network of past players who remain affiliated to the Club and we recently engaged with quite a few of them about the possibility of introducing an over 35's Greenwell Star team. We are aware that players once they finish playing often struggle to cope with missing the social aspect that they used to enjoy, so we believe it will help support better mental health by getting those older players back involved in the game in some capacity.

We have also recently noticed the increased number of young girls attending our Youth training sessions, so we believe the potential is there to develop a female youth team for when the boys and girls can no long be represented on the same teams.   

One of the most pressing things on the Committee's agenda at present is securing our own pitch. We believe this will allow us to grow as a Club and give us more freedom to develop our Youth set-up and the proposed over 35's and female teams. 

We are currently in negotiations with senior representatives from our local Council with regards to taking on the lease for one of the pitches in the West Winds Estate. This will be a major project for the Club, both financially and physically, but with the experience and support of our Club members and supporters we believe it will be very feasible and a worthwhile endeavour. 

We also plan to engage with the Education Authority and local Primary School that sits adjacent to the West Winds pitch to discuss the possibility of developing the multi-use facility that sits within the school grounds in order for the Club to use it for providing training for our teams. 

All of the above will be assessed as part of the Club's 5 Year Strategy & Development Plan, but essentially we see this as a larger overarching community project that will benefit the people of Newtownards and it's surrounding areas.

Why are we crowdfunding?

We have decided to pursue crowdfunding because we want to widen the Club's appeal to any prospective new members. Our intention is to provide them, and the fantastic members already at the Club, with the knowledge and skills to live more active and healthier lives. 

In addition to accessing the Emotional Health & Wellbeing workshops through Sport NI, there are a number of services that we would like to offer to Club members moving forward, these are:

• Workshops that explore the impact of your diet on emotional health;
• Workshops to help better understand the connection between physical activity and emotional health;
• Workshops on the dangers of risk taking behaviour;
• Workshops on the dangers and signposts for addictions; and 
• Workshops that explore the impact of substance misuse on emotional health.  

None of the above services will be forced upon Club members, however we will encourage people to avail of them and we will strive to make them as accessible as possible and in ways that statutory services may not be able to provide.

The Club would also like to align our youth football structure with our senior teams as far as possible, so in order to do that we believe that providing football coaching courses and mental health awareness sessions to as many people as possible across the whole spectrum of the Club will be of huge benefit. We also feel that purchasing adequate training and match day equipment to benefit all our teams, from youths through to adults, will go a long way in helping provide the physical activity that we are encouraging people to partake in.

Newtownards is an area filled with fantastic people and community resilience, however barriers do persist for some, and we believe that providing the services mentioned above, in addition to our football training and coaching, will provide safeguards to support those who face sporadic challenges and need accessible community based support.  

How we’ll spend the money raised

We are very clear how we will spend the money we raise.  We currently have a number of contacts who will be able to deliver the planned workshops, however we have not had the resource to provide the service as yet, therefore trying to raise this funding will provide much needed help in trying to achieve this.

We have never had financial support before in order to provide training and information on the wide range of topics that we want to focus on, whether it be alcohol / drugs misuse or how to improve both your diet and physical activities for better mental health, so this resource will enable us to provide a new level of support for Club members and hopefully the wider Newtownards community.

We also believe that expanding the footballing services that we offer to a wider range of age groups in Newtownards and the surrounding areas will also attract the interest of the wider community and help us to move forward with our other ambitions (see below), which will be reflected in our 5 Year Strategy & Development Plan:

• Vital tools to progress our club through physical and mental health training;
• Confidence, team and resilience training;
• Coaching qualifications;
• Growth of our Youth football structure;
• Young women's team;
• Over 35's team.

If you support us, donations will go directly to setting up and providing these new services.

How you can play your part

There are four simple ways to 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. Create a fundraiser of your own. Use the button on our page to get started. 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 23rd August 2022