A BWitC Summer Roundup

Bolton Wanderers in the Community are committed to using the power of our football club to bring about a connected Bolton without disadvantage. This is never more present than through our summer period during which our colleagues pulled together to help run a range of services across the school holidays.

Our Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) provisions, funded by the Department for Education, ran across multiple sites including our Sutton Estate Community Centre, St James’ School and local parks providing a free and safe space for young people across Bolton aged 8-17. Within our last week of sessions, we were delighted to welcome BWFC First Team Players Kyle Dempsey and Gethin Jones to our Sutton Estate Community Centre and show our BWFC Chairman Sharon Brittan around our St James HAF provision. You might have seen our viral video of Sharon taking her very own penalty shootout.

Our Bolton Lunches services running in conjunction with our HAF provision provided a total of 1455 free lunches over the summer period to 221 individuals. We would like to thank Urban Outreach for providing us with the lunches each day to ensure we could provide as many free meals as possible.

For all our budding future football pros our Kellogg’s Summer Soccer Camps ran out of Bolton Arena provided fun and engaging football provisions for 368 individuals aged 5–13. Our highly trained staff across the charity and Wanderers Sport in the Community provided a safe and welcoming environment for young people to practice their football skills and enjoy time with their friends. Over the 4 week period our Kellogg’s Summer Camp saw a total of 1142 attendances. We were delighted to be joined by BWFC First Team Players Randell Williams and Carlos Mendes Gomes on our first week to congratulate the young people who had taken part, hand out and sign certificates.

Our Headstart program running from January to December supports Year 6 students across Bolton in their transition from Primary to Secondary School through both classroom and 1-2-1 support. Over the summer school holidays our Education Team ran a series of Headstart group sessions including a day out at the Alpaca Farm and a trip to Bolton Library concluding with our Celebration event inviting young people from across the North West to our stadium where we held Mental Health Sessions, stadium tours and Yoga for them to get involved in. We were even surprised by a visit from BWFC’s Jack Iredale who took part in a Q&A as well as taking photos with our group. You can read more at bwitc.org.uk/headstart-for-young-people-across-bolton/

Although we have ran some short-term summer projects we can’t forget the amazing work our colleagues do day to day often splitting their time between our summer provisions and their year round services. Amongst some of our ongoing provisions are our Health and Wellbeing services including Active Wanderers, Extra Time Hub and Team Talk continued to provide space for local residents to positively impact both their mental and physical health whilst our Skills and Pathways Team continued to support the young people working toward positive futures with our ASPIRE and Working Wanderers programmes.

Richard Slater, Head of Community at BWitC, reflected “One thing this article can’t represent is the hard work and dedication our staff have provided to keep both our regular services and our summer provision running and seamless. We truly are stronger together and as a charity we are grateful to everyone who enables us to continue to support the Bolton community consistently throughout the year.” 

If you would like to see more about the work we do here at Bolton Wanderers in the Community you can read our 23/24 Season Impact Report