The pitch is currently blighted by drainage issues and is generally unplayable for a large part of the winter, preventing us from using it for youth football and wider community activities.
Making football – and sport – accessible to everyone in the Bishop's Cleeve and surrounding area is at the heart of everything we do but the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have been devastating for our club, both in financial and social terms.
The current situation has been a major setback for our plans to develop a modern community sports hub for everyone in our local area but there's a funding gap to complete the project, and we're hoping to raise as much as we can through this initiative.
So we're trying something different with Crowdfunder, where we can reward you for your support because we want to achieve this together as a community. We want to try and give back as much as we can and we have created this campaign with various rewards to say 'thank you' for your support.
Check out the local businesses that are supporting us with rewards on this page including Weird Fish, Collicutt Meats and Danny's Cafe and Bakery. And we have also enlisted the help of former Manchester United star Lee Sharpe and Gareth Southgate, the England manager, to launch it. You can watch Lee's video message below.
Almost every family in Bishop's Cleeve will probably know someone who has been involved with the club over the past 116 years.
Like many grassroots sports organisations, we are run by a team of volunteers that work tirelessly to establish a local club and facility for the village to enjoy without ever taking a wage, or making any money.
The club is run on a shoestring and without the continued support from local businesses and loyal members of the public it would have been difficult to continue.
But now we need the support of our wider community to help create an organisation for future generations to enjoy.
This new community facility is designed for everyone and each year almost 500 young players from Bishop'e Cleeve alone will use the facility alongside other local teams, schools and businesses.
The following organisations have already committed to using the hub:
There are four ways you can help us make this crowdfunding campaign a success.
1. Pledge your support for our new facility. We have produced a host of rewards on this page to thank you for your support.
2. Spread the word about our campaign. The further and wider we share the message about what we're doing, the more chance we have of making it a success. Please tell your friends, family and colleagues and share it on your social media pages.
3. Can you help us? If you're a local business and want to get involved to support us with rewards, get in touch. They could be meals, goodie boxes, MOTs, anything! We want to work with our community to offer supporters real value.
4. Join us with keepy-up challenge – let's have some fun! We want everyone in our community to try and do a few (or more!), film it and nominate someone else to take part. Then share your video and ask people to support us! We hope this will help our campaign to be seen far and wide on social media.
Simply put, our current grass pitch can't accommodate the increasing demand for player participation from all of the playing groups from the men, women and youth team – boys and girls – plus the disability sides.
So we are embarking on major and exciting improvements to our facility, replacing the floodlit grass pitch with a 100m x 64m 3G artificial turf pitch while improving the flood lighting and car parking facilities.
At present the club has 30 mini soccer and youth teams, four men's 11-a-side teams and one women's 11-a-side team, providing football opportunities for 650 children and adults with an ambition to increase to 45 teams over the next five years.
The total cost of this project is £771,000 and we have submitted a number of funding applications to help us reach our target, but as it stands our challenge is to raise a further ~£90,000 to bridge the gap.
We have set ourselves an initial target of £20,000 through Crowdfunder but we want to see how far we can get with your help.
We have the plans, the permissions and the project team. We're determined to complete this project and make a big difference to our local community and we are ready to go.
But we need your help to 'pitch in' and help us get this project over the 'touch line'. Together we can do this through Crowdfunder.