Help YFS and Keep Scotland Active

Youth Football Scotland (YFS) is a not-for-profit social enterprise which has served the grassroots community from the Borders to the Highlands and Islands for 10 years, with the primary target of inspiring more people to play and volunteer.

We do this through our Journalism & Media programme, which helps students build up a portfolio whilst providing confidence lifting media coverage. We have covered over 10,000 matches - impacting in excess of 100,000 players - and progressed over 100 volunteers into permanent employment within the sports media industry.

YFS generates over 70% of our income through matches and events. When 'football was cancelled', so was all of our planned work and all of our upcoming income. Our full-time team of seven talented and hard-working staff members were left without a job to do.

The UK Government has launched a scheme which allows employers to place employees on furlough. However, the scheme stipulates that any employee cannot continue doing any form of work. None of our team wanted to be paid for doing nothing. We made a group decision to invest our working hours into helping the community however we could. We are about to launch a website called 'Keep Scotland Active' which does what it says on the tin. It provides every resource possible, to help players, parents, coaches and supporters through this.

We have decided not to charge for the service, as we think it should be available to all. However, it will cost us money to build, to maintain and to continue evolving in order to help our community through this crisis.

 We want to help the community now and we want to be around to continue providing core YFS services when normality returns.