Best Corporate Social Responsibility Scheme 2017

Burnley FC in the Community

We are Burnley FC in the Community, the official charity of Burnley FC. We use the power of our football club to inspire, support and deliver change to a cross-section of people in the communities surrounding the Turf Moor stadium.

We are a dynamic, innovative and fast-growing organisation. In the space of three short years since our founding, we have expanded to a £2m charity, employing almost 70 members of staff and delivering over 30 community projects across East Lancashire.

During the 16/17 season, a big focus of our work was on the planning, management and execution of our facilities strategy.

Working to a strategy from August 2016, we have opened an education hub at UCFB Burnley to great success, started work on a brand new leisure facility, we are refurbishing and reopening a much-loved local outdoor education centre and we are working on the implementation of a new town-centre Community Kitchen.

Our submission gives the details of the development of our facilities portfolio and the reasons why we are proud of the work that has, and will, be done via these spaces to address the needs of the special people in our communities.

Everton in the Community

Everton in the Community was the first football charity in the Premier League to nominate a ‘Neighbourhood Manager’.

Since the Club and charity launched the role of Neighbourhood Manager in August 2015, a lot of feedback has taken place around how we can become a better neighbour. Through various consultation forums, we aim to support local employability schemes, become transparent with our neighbours about ongoing work, champion local business and help bring investment into the local area with housing support, as well as working on crime awareness and matchday activity.

Goodison Park is based in the heart of the Everton ward and our Neighbourhood Manager is easily accessible to neighbours and sees them on a day-to-day basis through various events/programmes that the charity runs, right through to drop-in sessions.

We have off site facilities in Everton Free School and a Community Hub which is open to local residents and businesses.

This work undertaken in our neighbourhood, and by supporting the security element along our local High Street (County Road), has meant that more businesses have opened and closed for the first time in 10 years. It has also contributed to the decrease in crime statistics by 7%.

Liverpool FC

Football has the exceptional ability to bring communities together and span generations to inspire positivity and drive change.

The Red Neighbours team’s combined experience and knowledge allows them to seamlessly work across Anfield and the surrounding areas, pulling together agencies to work collectively for the benefit of the wider community.

They understand that a collaborative way of working is the ideal approach to making a real impact and that the Club cannot tackle the deeply entrenched issues that these communities face alone. The team is focused on tackling local perceived need whilst so taking into account intelligence and data reports from local health authorities and council departments in order to understand the wider landscape and broader priorities.

In addition to the team we have a range of fantastic assets available to us including; our players, our staff, and our fantastic stadium, which is situated in the heart of the Anfield community.

As a universally recognisable brand, with over 700 million fans worldwide, we also have access to a global platform, which can be used to highlight and raise awareness of key issues in order to gain support to help address them.

Swansea City AFC

Give A Jack A Jacket was a social inclusion marketing initiative that aimed to not only give back to the community, it aimed at bringing the fans and the club together.

As a Premier League football club, we have the power to improve the lives of our fans and the less fortunate within our local communities, and that was the challenge we set ourselves when devising this social inclusion marketing campaign.

A simple, yet inventive initiative, Give A Jack A Jacket wasn’t just a positive piece of PR, it was a campaign that the whole club and community got behind to give back and to do some good.

The Football Foundation

In delivering The Premier League & The FA Facilities Fund, the Football Foundation has transformed the landscape of grassroots football in towns and cities across the country.

It is a truly unique public-private-partnership CSR scheme that brought together the whole football family, with government, to radically improve the nation’s grassroots football infrastructure and open up access to our national game to record numbers of people.

By also linking these new sites with Professional Football Clubs, from the Premier League to Non-League, the Foundation also ensured that this new generation of sports facilities did not just enable many more local people to enjoy regular football. These sites have also become inspirational venues at which this country’s Football Clubs deliver life-changing outreach work to real people in their communities, week-in, week-out.