Young people helping to tackle poor mental health through Premier League Inspires Challenge

Participants from Bolton Wanderers in the Community have joined forces with more than 200 young people from across England and Wales to create a mentally healthy environment at their football clubs and in their communities, as part of this year’s Premier League Inspires Challenge.

The Challenge is one element of the Premier League Inspires programme, which clubs run on a weekly basis to support 11–18-year-olds who may be at risk of not reaching their potential as they move through the education system and early adulthood.

The Premier League Inspires Challenge empowers participants to take on a social action project and make a difference to the world around them.

For this, our PL Inspires participants from Bolton Muslim Girls school aimed to educate local football fans at Bolton Wanderers on the importance of starting conversations around mental health. They set out to equip local fans with conversation starters needed to engage in these important discussions with friends, family, and colleagues. The team decided that there is a need to give people the tools to feel comfortable to check in with one another and discuss their mental health. They felt that offering conversation starters would be helpful to others to help them to navigate these conversations. The team have plans to build upon their idea by reaching out to the local community through Bolton Wanderers in the Community.

The young people have also built on their project by participating in team building days at the Toughsheet Community Stadium and having meetings with local graphic designers from creative arena to help bring their idea to life! The aim is to produce a graphic that will be displayed in BWFC Wellbeing Hub where local fans will see it on a daily basis!

Having come up with their mental health social action ideas, BWitC participants joined hundreds of young people at the Premier League Inspires Challenge celebration event at Wembley Stadium [on 25 April], where they shared details of their activity with teams of their peers representing 45 clubs from across the Premier League and the English Football League.

This Challenge builds upon the Premier League’s ongoing Inside Matters mental health campaign and the League’s commitment as a signatory of the Mentally Healthy Football Declaration in 2020, which brought together all UK football organisations to help create a mentally healthy environment across the game.

Premier League Charitable Fund Chief Executive, Ruth Shaw OBE, said: “The Premier League and Premier League Charitable Fund are committed to working with professional football clubs, fans, players, communities, and partners to remind everyone that it is okay not to be okay and that it is vitally important that we keep up the conversation on mental health.

“Through the Premier League Inspires Challenge young people from across England and Wales have developed some brilliant ideas to create positive, mentally healthy environments at their football clubs and in school, at home and in their communities.”

Launched in 2019, Premier League Inspires creates life-changing opportunities for young people who have been identified by their schools as needing extra support to engage with activities, helping them to develop the personal skills and positive attitudes needed to succeed in life.

Using the power of football, the programme helps to prepare young people for further education and employment through a series of face-to-face mentoring sessions, workshops and social-action projects.

This season, 45 professional football club community organisations across the Premier League and English Football League are delivering Premier League Inspires sessions at their stadiums, in local schools and at alternative educational settings, with partnership support from the Professional Footballers’ Association.

More than 29,000 young people from across England and Wales have received more than 125,000 hours of targeted support through the programme to date.

To find out more, please visit premierleague.com.