FC Darlington Locomotives- Kit & Equipment Fund

What is the crowd fund for?

In the current economic climate and to help address some of the issues around the cost-of-living crisis we would like to buy new training kit and playing equipment for the girls both currently at the club and those who join us on a weekly basis. The current kit is no longer available to purchase and as a result, new girls joining us aren’t able to have the same kit as our existing playing squad. The rising number of girls joining means we need more kit, in addition we need to further upskill our coaches to ensure we meet FA guidelines. Raising funds would allow us to keep current subscriptions the lowest in Darlington and ensure that girls football is accessible to all.

Who we are?

FC Darlington Locomotives is a local community sports club located in Darlington, County Durham. We are a family-oriented club ran purely by volunteers. We have over 100 junior members with multiple teams at most age groups and are actively growing week by week. We also run a Wildcat Centre for girls 5-11-year-old who are new to football and are part of the new FA initiative Squad Girls for 12-14-year olds.

Community impact

FC Darlington Locomotive’s base is situated in a low socio-economic area (IMD 2, NS SEC 6-8). An area which has 42% of its employed residents classed as ‘Low Skilled Workers’. The local primary school has 71% Free School Meals and between 38-40% children are classed as obese. Many households in the area have deprived young families and as such we have helped with some of these issues by donating to foodbanks, fed hungry children, families and elderly in the area and raised funds for afternoon teas, meals and Christmas meals for those in need or alone. We have also recently become part of a national litter picking campaign in conjunction with CleanUp UK, where just after Christmas the girls, their families, coaches and local sports centre staff collected 32 bags of rubbish in just 2 hours.

Why are we crowdfunding?

The wonderful legacy of the triumph by the Lionesses at Euro 2022 has seen our numbers grow significantly with new girls enquiring and joining us every week.  With the cost of living crisis and current economic situation, we are trying to keep costs as low as possible, but still want the girls to have kit to be proud of and equipment to ensure all of them have equal access.  In addition we want to ensure we have coaches trained to a high-level including qualifications in mental health, disability, talent spotting as well as legislative FA coaching qualifications. Our goal is to support families to ensure that our football offer is not cost prohibitive and to help us keep subscription costs as low as possible to ensure that girls football in the area is inclusive for all and of the highest possible standard.

How we’ll spend the money raised

All monies raised will be used to provide new training kit for all girls, it will be used to help meet current costs for additional training for coaches to meet our increasing numbers and will help to ensure that every girl has access to equipment to train and help them develop to reach their own potential.

How you can play your part

Please help us keep supporting girls from our local community.

Tell everyone you know – please share this on social media and help us to tell everyone what we are doing and how they can be part of this.

Make a pledge. Please do this as soon as possible to help build momentum for the project.  

Offer rewards. If you are a local business, please donate so that we can offer rewards to our supporters.   All donations gratefully received, and will be acknowledged.  We are very socially active and have over 952 Facebook followers. We will mention you in our posts please have a look on Facebook, search – @darlolocos or FC Darlington Locomotives.

We’d be hugely grateful if you’re able to pledge to our campaign to help us reach our target in the specified timeframe. This will enable us to continue to support the girls at our club and our local community in these very difficult times. Thank you for taking the time to look at this and we hope you will support us in our goal of making being physically active the easy option for all our female community.