Hate Crime Awareness Week was a big week for the Community Foundation, we spent the week working with the young people of Crawley to promote the importance of ‘Reporting and Understanding Hate Crime’.
Throughout the week at our Premier League KICKs sessions, the Community Foundation delivered activities and competitions to support ‘Kick It Out’ in combatting Hate Crime. We started off the week by heading to our Maidenbower session with a Crossbar Challenge. While the challenge was happening, the coach had the opportunity to talk to them a bit about the importance of reporting Hate Crime and the impact it can have on people who are being targeted. The young people really enjoyed the challenge, supporting one another throughout and celebrating the winners achievement.
Tuesday, we visited Langley Green’s KICKs session with first team player Mark Connolly. He spoke to the kids about football and educating them a little on Hate Crime. They also found common ground breaking the ice between player and kids by playing an excellent tournament together, which made the kids week.
Mark Connolly said about Hate Crime, “Hate Crime is one of those things that shouldn’t be around. Bringing awareness is massively important. Obviously in football, that’s somewhere that it’s showing its colours and we are campaigning quite a lot to kick it out of football.”
The Langley Green sessions are a younger demographic and our coaches put together a fantastic session which helped them to understand what #HateCrimeAwarenessWeek is all about.
Adam Wicking, Premier League Project Co-ordinator, said this about Hate Crime Week, “It is so crucial to teach young people that Hate crime is not okay. If they have this philosophy from a younger age they will hold onto it when they grow up”
We also visited our Extra Time Walking Football session on Friday with first team players Bondz N’Gala and Dom Poleon. This session was aimed at supporting the participants and introducing the players to the concept of Walking Football. The players really got involved which meant all the which made a lot of the participants week as they love Crawley Town FC, some being supporters for 40 years.
Later that Friday, we delivered our final session with Broadfield Premier League KICKs, this session had a large turnout of about 30 kids. Three first team players, Lewis Young, Yusuf Mersin & Jimmy Smith, came along to the session to talk to them all about hate crime and how it can be prevented, but they also had time to join in on a match refereeing and goalkeeping for one of the teams. The kids had an amazing time showing off their skills to the players.
Overall it was a fantastic week and we had so much player support for a very important cause. All participants were able to learn something new and play some football with some of their favourite players. Additionally, the huge amount of support from parents or followers on social media on all our activities helped us to spread the message that its FULL TIME ON HATE CRIME.
To keep up to date with all the charities and important events we support follow our social media: Twitter – @CrawleyTownCF or @CTFC_Kicks, Facebook- www.facebook.com/ctcommunityfoundation/ , Instagram- @CrawleyTownCF
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