Sport England: Active Together has provided £10,000 of match funding
Darlington RFC Pass It On – For Real!
Darlington, England, United Kingdom
Aim
Please help us to overcome the financial challenges presented by Covid-19 and enable our Club to continue to move onward and upward!
To all the generous people that supported us last time, we have a new Crowdfunder campaign to raise funds for new, reliable lighting:
DRFC Let there be light!
Please support us again.
About the Club
Established 1863, Darlington Rugby Football Club is one of the oldest rugby clubs in the world. We are a community-based club with a flourishing Minis and Juniors section with around 250 children, from age 4 to 17, training or playing rugby every week throughout the season. We have a successful Ladies’ 1st XV team and three Men’s teams, including our 1st XV, our 2nd XV, and our very popular and highly successful Darlington Dinosaurs (veterans team). At our grounds at Blackwell Meadows, we also host the Darlington Young Bulls Football Club, a thriving grassroots community football club with teams from Under 7's to Adults, the Darlington Steam American Football Club, and the Gentlemen and Lady Archers of Darlington, as well as the National League side, Darlington Football Club (The Quakers).
Darlington RFC draws a diverse membership from a large catchment, from Teesdale and Barnard Castle to the west, to Richmond and rural North Yorkshire to the South, to the more urban areas of the Tees Valley and especially the town of Darlington, to the North and East. This catchment covers more affluent districts as well as areas of extreme social deprivation. We as a club are passionate about providing opportunities for all our members and we want everyone regardless of their age, background, or level of ability to feel welcome here and able to take part in sport and physical activity which is so important to physical and mental well-being. We recognise that sport is often people's "safety net", something they use to allow them to take their mind off the stresses of work, and life in general and we continue to support all of our members, with trained Mental Health First Aiders within the Club.
From thriving to surviving
2020 has not been an easy year. The rugby season started off well with beautiful sunshine in September, but then the impact of COVID-19 in early Spring meant a damp-squib end to the season. Sport ceased immediately for all our rugby teams and associated sports clubs, our end of season rugby tours were postponed, our teams’ never got to hold their end-of season awards nights and the season finale – our regionally famous Minis & Juniors Rugby Festival – also had to be cancelled. Not only did this effect morale and esprit de corps, but with the Club’s community, leisure, and hospitality activities grinding halt, Club finances were hit hard.
The only ray of hope in the early days of the ‘Covid Crisis’ was a video orchestrated by one of our coaches – Ally Carter. He came up with an idea that we could all pass a rugby ball in our gardens during lockdown around Easter time and video each pass in Covid isolation and then stitch it all together. The idea caught on and produced a wonderful example of all ages working as one to achieve something that lifted everyone’s morale. The ‘Virtual Pass It On Challenge’ is shown below:
From surviving to thriving
In September, after many years of dedicated service, the majority of the Board of Directors stood down, and a new set of enthusiastic, capable volunteers took over. This new team have been working tirelessly over recent months to try to ensure the Club has been available as much as possible for our members, whilst trying to reduce costs and make the most of very limited income opportunities. However, there is a tough period ahead before, hopefully, everything returns to normal next season.
The idea behind this Crowdfunder campaign was to engage as many players and their families, as well as associated clubs, in both bolstering the coffers, to help get us through this tough patch, and to culminate the fundraising campaign with a renewed ‘Pass It On’ challenge, under the (hopefully) more relaxed COVID-19 restriction over Christmas and New Year (at least in comparison with Easter time). We’d like this to be an opportunity for many people, even in these strange times, to work together across our membership-player territory to Pass It On – For Real!
More information on the new ‘Pass It On – For Real!’ challenge will be shared soon.
Where Will The Money Raised Be Spent?
Your support will help the Club in the following areas:
- We will invest in installing a new switch board for the floodlights that can be accessed by team coaches, thereby enabling teams to train on dark winter evenings, without having to employ staff to open the Clubhouse and switch on the floodlights for them.
- We have had to implement various Covid-19 measures to enable the safe return to rugby for all club players, coaches, staff, volunteers, members and supporters, such as signage, hand sanitising stations, outside food catering, disinfecting equipment, which is ongoing as we aim to improve and optimise our response.
- We continue to suffer a huge loss of income due to reduced hospitality as a result of Covid-19.
- Maintaining all of our pitches throughout the winter months so they can be used as much as possible by our teams and associated sports.
- Maintaining our indoor facilities.
We are therefore asking our local community, club members, players, parents, supporters, residents, and businesses to collectively help us through this challenging period in our history. With your help, we can continue to provide members of our community with the opportunity to take part in a range of sporting activities.
Any donations received will be hugely appreciated and will be used to undertake the works highlighted above, so please donate if you can and 'pass it on' to a friend or colleague to help spread the word.
We would also like to express our thanks to everyone that have helped us in putting together this campaign, from taking part in and producing our video in the depths of lockdown, to providing the images, to helping with the media campaign, to the individuals and businesses donating rewards, and everyone who has shared facebook posts and generally helped promote it - thank you!
This project successfully funded on 8th January 2021