Herons Youth Fc Club Refurbishment

Aim

We want to make an inviting, warm, friendly, safe environment for kids to play, learn and enjoy football while also serving the community!!

We are Herons Youth Football Club

We are a volunteer run grassroots football club based in North Watford. Serving our community we have a diverse selection of players and coaches within the club. We have teams playing matches ranging from U7's through to U16's currently. We also set up an initiative for Little Herons allowing children from the age of 3 to start learning and having fun playing football. Our club ethos is we always allow children the opportunity to be a part of the team regardless of gender, ethnicity and ability. Unlike some other teams in our area we try our best to help our local community by keeping costs affordable especially since a, the pandemic and now b, the cost of living. Why should the children have to suffer and miss out??

Why are we crowdfunding?

We are looking to raise money to help us refurbish our current clubhouse, which has been standing since the early 1990's. Unfortunately the clubhouse has seen better days and is now suffering from damp and mould ridden areas. We have tried to fix things as we have seen them but we haven't been able to keep up with it. We want to be able to give the kids, their parents and also others from the community a nice, inviting place to enjoy. Currently we are failing to do so as we have leaking facilities, cold changing rooms and a shower room that's being used for storage.

In the last 3 years our club has suffered some awful setbacks, as have other clubs and people locally, we had to deal with lockdowns and deaths. We lost a coach to Lung Cancer and recently we lost our long standing Treasurer also to Cancer. Due to this the club is currently going through some changes in personnel with our Chairman, Secretary and stand in Treasurer all stepping away from their duties after many years.

This has meant that some of the younger members of the Committee have had to step forward to take on the running of the club, ensuring that the clubs key values are continued and that the club can keep offering to the community. This means now more than ever the club needs to be brought into the present instead of living in the past. As we are one of the smaller clubs in our area we can only run a certain amount of teams which then limits our ability to raise much needed funds to be able to expand/refurbish ourselves.
The below photo’s show just some areas of our current clubhouse. Whilst we had tried a little while back to tackle small jobs such as painting and plastering these temporarily masked over the bigger issues such as damp, leaks and cracks appearing. This is such a dark, cold and damp space which is uninviting as so therefor very underused. It also shows the outside shed space we currently store our goals in due to no other storage space and the severe roof damage that has been done to this due to bad weather conditions. 

How we’ll spend the money raised

All money raised will go towards the remodelling and refurbishing of our current clubhouse to bring it into a more modern era. We want to update and upgrade our kitchen area to be able to serve food and drink, pitch side for parents and locals to allow us to generate more funds to keep the club running. 

Once the club has been refurbished we would then look at the internal seating and communal areas to be given a new lease of life to make a nice, comfortable and warm social space for all to enjoy.

Community impact

By making the clubhouse a more inviting and usable place we want to be able to give more back to the community and offer the space we do have, to other local projects and groups who may not have anywhere currently to use. 

Obviously our number 1 priority is to the children involved with the club, as we want to give them the best clubhouse we can and somewhere for them to be proud of. With being situated next to a children's play area we also want to be able to offer visitors a service in the way of food, drinks and use of decent toilet facilities.

Who knows in the future we may even get to see the club being used as a youth club as one is definitely missing in the area and is much needed for kids to use. This is due to the council closing down the local adventure playground/youth facility. 

How you can play your part

There are five 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. Fundraise for us. If you want to run your own fundraiser – 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!

5. Sponsor us. If you want to become a sponsor for the new season coming then please get in touch. 

From All at Herons Youth FC - - - Thank You

This project successfully funded on 23rd May 2023