Blackpool FC and the Community Trust pride ourselves in saying we are the town’s club and that we have been here through the most difficult of years to support our community.

Ashley Hackett Chief Executive Officer of Blackpool FC Community Trust, reflects on an unprecedented year.

“As we see a very exciting end to the season we have taken the time to reflect on the impact we have had on our community this past year.

As a collective, Blackpool FC and Blackpool FC Community Trust pride ourselves in saying we are the town’s club and that we have been here through the most difficult of years to support our community.

We delivered an amazing Christmas campaign in December, to make sure no young person in Blackpool was without a gift on Christmas morning. Whilst the money raised was absolutely unbelievable, the most incredible part was developing a campaign that genuinely brought the club, players, Community Trust, fans and local people together, with one goal. It was truly heart-warming and still raises goosebumps when thought about.

The difficulty this year has been in finding ways to continue to deliver our community provision through the lockdowns. We have managed to support through face to face delivery in local schools, phone calls and door step visits with our most isolated residents, by delivering food parcels to those most in need and by developing a host of virtual and digital platforms to stay in contact with as many of our participants as possible.

We have continued to deliver many of our most impactful programmes, like Fit2Go, Unstoppable and our Blackpool FC Sports College courses, whilst introducing some very exciting new programmes targeted at different audiences.

One of these is our new High School Hubs programme, which places members of our team in every secondary school in Blackpool, for at least two days every week, to support with pupils resilience and mental health. Another is our Pool Together programme, providing the most socially isolated individuals in our community with support that they may have never been able to access in the past.

We launched our ADDER project to provide adults suffering from drug and alcohol addictions with a more positive path and to use sport, physical activity and volunteering to help change their mindset.

We have also been very proud to take on coordination of the local HAF project for the whole of Blackpool, which provides local children, that are on free school meals, with a hot meal and fun activities to take part in during school holidays.

All of the above are a very small number of examples of the great work the team deliver and despite living and working through Covid-19 restrictions and national and local lockdowns we were still able to support more than 18,000 individual local people in the town, deliver more than 8000 sessions through the year and have over 500,000 engagements across our programmes.

The year also saw us able to form some fantastic links with our inspiring Head Coach, Neil Critchley and his first team squad, who have been amazing in linking into our programmes and supporting local people. This has included attending many of our sessions, presenting to our Sports College students and making phone calls to local people. This resulted in awarding our club captain Chris Maxwell with the PFA Community Player of the Year. Chris has taken a leading role in getting the lads involved and has engaged more than anyone else, attending our Team Talk Mental Health sessions whenever possible.

This has truly been a season like no other, with challenges no one has ever seen before, but with the support of the club, fans and our local community we are very proud to be able to continue to support so many people.”