Sport England - Movement Fund has provided £7,500 of match funding
Kings Park Bowls Club Crowdfunder
Bournemouth, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, United Kingdom
Aim
Kings Park BC are raising funds to improve our green and its accessibility, and to make environmentally friendly changes to our clubhouse.
Who are we?
We are Kings Park Bowls Club, a lawn bowls club, located on the south coast in Bournemouth. In 2025 we celebrated our 120th anniversary, becoming one of the oldest bowls clubs in the Bournemouth area. We have active teams in local leagues, and are represented at all levels of lawn bowls in England, enjoying success at a local, district, county and national level.
We are a fully mixed club, where gender or age does not preclude you from playing this sport. We have members ranging in age from seventeen to eighty seven, and see ourselves as an important local community asset that provides the opportunity for everyone of all ages and backgrounds to keep active.
We are based in the Boscombe area of Bournemouth and serves some of the most deprived areas within the town. We work within the local community, hosting visiting community groups, sporting groups and schools.
During the winter months we host a fellowship club, which caters for mainly elderly members, and gives many of them the opportunity to socialise with others during the long winter months, which is an especially important lifeline to our members that live alone.
Why are we crowdfunding?
As a club, having successfully navigated our way through Covid, and out the other side, we are now looking at how we build and sustain our club, and lawn bowls in the future.
Our biggest asset is our beautiful lawn bowls green, and making this the best and most accessible playing surface that it can be is one of our top priorities. Good maintenance equipment for the green and surrounding areas will enable us to make the green as good as it possibly can be, and allow us to attract more people to the sport.
Our next biggest asset is our clubhouse. In the last one hundred years it has been expanded, redecorated and repurposed to become a thriving social space that provides not only a clubhouse for members, but offers short mat bowls, darts, cribbage, snooker and corn hole to enable us to offer activities to members, all year round. To improve the sustainability of our club, we now want to look at what environmentally friendly changes we can make to the clubhouse, such as LED lighting and the introduction of water butts to reduce costs and to be able to continue offering a variety of activities into the future.
Our third aim is to make our bowls club accessible to all. We want to remove barriers to enable everyone, from all backgrounds and abilities to get active and enjoy the sport of bowls. We want to invest in equipment that will allow those with disabilities to be able to enjoy our green, facilities and the sport. In addition, we want to look to invest in junior equipment in order for us to be able to run junior sessions at weekends, and after school. With approximately 39% of women making up the active bowls population, we also want to focus on encouraging younger women into the sport.
How we’ll spend the money raised
For our lawn bowls green we want to:
• Purchase a variety of cartridges to fit our Dennis lawn mower, so that we can perform a range of maintenance to our green, including verti-cutting, spiking and aeration tasks, which will help us be self-sustaining in green maintenance
• Install new and safer steps and ramps to to improve accessibility to the green, particularly for those with mobility issues
For our clubhouse we want to:
• Install water butts to allow us reuse rain water from our guttering to water our surrounding plants and the bowls green
• Replace our existing lights with LED lighting throughout in order to reduce our carbon footprint and reduce our electricity outgoings
To encourage new members we want to invest in:
• Junior sized bowls to introduce younger players to the game
• Bowling arms for those less physically able to bend and crouch to deliver their bowls
- Coaching courses, materials and equipment
Community impact
Our club sits in the heart of Boscombe, in Bournemouth. Whilst our primary focus is to offer a lawn bowls facility, we aim to offer a variety of activities to members of the local community. These activities include opening our doors three days a week to social members during the winter to play darts, cribbage and snooker. Often these members are elder members of the community, often with no family at home, or with little contact with the outside world, other than the links and friendships that they build at our club.
In addition, we aim to offer accessible pathways to everyone from all backgrounds to get active by providing the equipment needed to enjoy the sport, ramps and aids for those more physically challenged, and to provide coaching to all new members to ensure that this becomes a sport that they can enjoy for life.
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. 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!
This project successfully funded on 8th May 2026