Sport Northern Ireland: Creating Opportunities has provided £3,382 of match funding
Support for Woodvale youth academy
Belfast, United Kingdom
Boost your impact
Your donation unlocks match funding
Aim: We are looking at the expansion of girls football in our local community, trying to focus on younger girls from the ages of 2 to 10 years.
Who are we?
We are a community-based football academy in West Belfast, an area of high social and economic deprivation. We are a newly founded football academy and have been running for little over 5 years in the greater Shankill area of Belfast.
We started out them 5 years ago with a mixed team of boys and girls 11 in total playing in the Girdwood Development program, in those 5 years we have seen our numbers swell to over 150 playing across 9 different age groups with 13 teams all competing at different levels of development.
We also have a highly popular mini soccer program that we hold in the Shankill leisure center free of charge, weekly on a Friday evening, this offers children from the age of 2 an opportunity to pick up the basics from our volunteer coaches.
With more financial help we see an opportunity to pave the way for a new girl only academy which will provide girls that are new to the sport the proper type of coaching and development to enable them to push onto the next level and start their footballing journey.
Why are we crowdfunding?
The reason behind Woodvale youth academy's crowd funding is to bring some much-needed financial support to our academy, in order to develop and grow new youth sections at our club. Through Crowdfunder we aim to target a brand-new target group of young girls (Particularly primary school age girls) and bring onboard more teams than ever for Woodvale Football club.
To do this, we need to make this attractive and appealing to young girls and we believe that we have a very big target audience and are planning to advertise in local schools and community groups within our area.
How will we do this???, This doesn't come cheap, so to do this properly we will need to purchase new football equipment, we will require support to assist with the development and education of new coaches, Money will be required for venue hire and coaching costs, and we believe through these purchases that we will be in a better position to deliver coaching at a very good standard.
The aims of this project would be to deliver an 8-week training camp running 2 nights a week, aimed at new girls from ages of 5 to 10 years of age, at Clarendon sports facility as well as an extension to our mini soccer program catering for girls only development alongside our boys academy (which will continue to run alongside this project for rest of the calendar year) we hope by running this we could secure between 2 and 4 new age groups between 2019 and 2015, hopefully welcoming 20 to 30 new girls to the club for start of next season.
How we’ll spend the money raised
By supporting us we will aim to bring young girls into the sport from as young as 2 year old through our mini soccer program, whilst doing this we will look to start coaching girls from the age of 5 to enable them to compete in junior football and turnout for our club in the IFA run development program at the valley leisure and eventually in the South Belfast Youth Football League.
We aim to use any money raised to fund the following
* Extend our Mini soccer program for rest of 2025 in Shankill leisure Centre (This alone would cost close to £800)
* Equipment purchases to enable development of our girls, at present a lot of our existing equipment is worn or outdated and needs updated or replaced. (we have quoted with a supplier that it will take around £1400 to purchase new equipment)
* Use of quality training facilities for younger girls (Venue costs for Clarendon sports facility at £25 PH needed for 2 nights training and games at weekends)
* Qualified IFA level coaches to help the young girls not only learn footballing skills but learn about the need for fitness, teamwork and eating healthy. (4 Coaches to get sent on their IFA level 1 coaches' course to allow them to deliver quality sessions) Costs around £220 a coach to participate.
* Help us as an academy to train new coaches to enable our teams to grow and progress.
* Help educate them around things such as Bullying and mental health through games and talks with local charity groups that we have already assisting with our club.
* Kits and training gear to allow us to support working class parents and give the kids a sense of belonging.
Community impact
We work within our local community not only to bring football to all but to promote positive wellbeing too. This is something as a club that we pride ourselves on and something that drives us on to help within our local community, we do this through local fundraisers and our academy end of season presentations, which sees us open up the clarendon facility to all for a day of fun with bouncy castles, disco, face painting, balloon modelling, prize-giving's, slush machines, candy floss and popcorn.
We also hold an annual Christmas party for all academy members and their families which is a great way of bringing the community together, with last year being the biggest yet with over 200 kids across 3 days attending out purpose built Santas grotto at clarendon (pics below)
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!
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 11th July 2025 at 1:21pm