We are pleased to announce that we have sponsored the latest Termly Challenge, a Go4it school initiative run by Hti. Hti is the leading  UK charity that works at the strategic interface between education and business. Go4it is a national award for schools which demonstrate a culture of creativity, innovation and adventure for learning with a positive attitude towards risk. 

The Termly Challenge is open to all Go4it schools in the UK and there are prizes for the winners in two categories. The aim of our Termly Challenge is to demonstrate a spirit of enterprise, innovation and creativity in raising money for using to pledge seats in the PledgeMySeat virtual stadium.

Submissions need to be in by 1st April, so start your challenge soon!

For more details visit Hti

Today we launch our global legacy campaign, aimed at sending over 94,700 pairs of 4sport football boots to underprivileged African children.

Based on the venue for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, we have created a virtual stadium and are selling virtual seats priced at £14.99. Every seat represents a new pair of boots that we will donate to our charity partners on the purchaser’s behalf.

All our charity partners are what we call ‘practitioners’, organisations who actually get their hands dirty and use sport as a building block of social change. Each uses sport, and particularly football as a way of engaging with children and educating them in issues such as HIV prevention, dealing with the stigma of carrying Aids as well as teaching basic life skills such as respect for others and self esteem.

To kickstart the campaign, we have pledged 500 seats (500 football boots).

As this is a global campaign focussed around social media, we want as many people as possible to share what we’re doing with friends, colleagues and associates and generally spreading our campaing far and wide. In return for this we will donate an additional 500 football boots if we reach 20,000 registered email address on the site before Xmas day 2009.

Pledge your seat for a chance to win a life changing trip to Africa.

Visit:

PledgeMySeat Website

Twitter Page

Facebook Page

Many thanks for your support and spread the word!

Last night saw us attend yet another awards evening, this time mixing with selected celebrities and sports stars in London for the annual SCORE4africa awards.

Nomiated as finalists in the Enterprise section, we competed with Alive and Kicking and Soul of Africa and ultimately finished second, behind Alive and Kicking. Our entry centred around our ‘Boot Library’ concept, allowing Townships in Africa to benefit from managing and using sports equipment. Our model is to work with a local community organisation that has the capacity and storage capability to house a library, and which is already running a football programme for children. By developing these partnerships we can tap into local knowledge, engage local people and access thousands of underpriveleged kids.

The event invited nominations in eleven categories and shortlisted finalists included The Didier Drogba Foundation, Michael Essien, Kick it Out, The Nwankwu Kanu Heart Foundation and The Craig Bellamy Foundation amongst many others.

There were some big names in attendance and it was a great chance to network with key decision makers such as Lord Triesman, FA Chairman, as well as 2009 award judges Marcel Desailly, Nancy Dell’Olio and Brian Oliver, Sports Editor of The Observer.

SCORE4africa is a social enterprise wholly owned by UK registered charity The African Foundation for Development (AFFORD). SCORE4africa believes football can help transform lives and recognise, reward and encourage those individuals, organisations, players, accademies and institutions using football as a tool to drive positive change in Africa.

Congratulations to Alive and Kicking and all last nights winners and finalists.

Thirsk Falcons Junior Football Club of the Teeside Junior Football Alliance are pictured proudly wearing new 4sport boots, courtesy of team sponsors Printing.com, Middlesborough.

The boys from the under 8 team will now wear the boots as part of their official strip, leading to a more visible club identity and feeling of inclusion. Explaining the motivation behind the boot purchase, Garry Ingoldsby, Director of Printing.com commented;

“Supporting social and environmental causes is at the heart of everything we do. We are always on the look-out for new and exciting community initiatives to support and kick4change hits all the right buttons. We are proud to support kick4change and Thirsk Falcons by sponsoring the purchase of boots and look forward to a successful future partnership.”

Club Chairman Colin Smith agreed;

“The club is firmly behind kick4change. We are keen to encourage young people from all backgrounds to join our club and develop the footballing talent for the future. With an organisation such as kick4change offering top quality football boots for such a low price and re-investing their profits into grass roots sporting clubs, this makes football available and accessible to all.”

You can follow the progress of the team by visiting www.thirskfalcons.org.uk

We had great pleasure in donating a pair of boots to Free Kicks Foundation, a charity who provide football related activities to sick, bereaved and disadvantaged children, giving them a day to remember with their favourite football club.

On Saturday we met with Steve Thorpe at Bramall Lane and handed over some boots that Sheffield United fan Kiera, pictured, proudly wore during her afternoon as the Blades mascot. We also handed over a pair of boots that Steve hopes to get players to sign and will auction off to raise further funds.

We look forward to working with Free Kicks Foundation on future events.

For some weeks now we have been preparing to launch our ‘PledgeMySeat‘ campaign, designed to send over 94,700 new 4sport football boots to underprivileged African Children

We have created a 2010 virtual stadium, based on the venue for the 2010 World Cup final and are encouraging fans, schools, clubs and businesses to buy virtual seats.

For every seat pledged we will send over a pair of new 4sport football boots to one of our charity partners, enabling them to use the boots to engage with children from townships all over Africa, educating them in issues such as HIV prevention, Aids awareness and life skills such as self esteem and respect.

Given the injustice of last Wednesday’s France versus Ireland result and the subsequent fury it has provoked, we have decided to help Irish fans put their own stamp on the World Cup and leave a lasting legacy. For every Irish fan who pledges a seat, we will print an Irish flag on the boots we send over, meaning that if the Irish fans and team won’t be in Africa in person, they will be there in spirit.

Fans of other nations who share the anger at the injustice of the Irish result can also throw their weight behind the cause. When pledging your seat, simply select Ireland as your country and we’ll print an Irish flag on those boots we send to Africa on your behalf.

Let’s together send out a load and clear message to the French and the footballing authorities: ‘They can prevent Ireland from participating in the 2010 tournament, but they can’t prevent us from playing our part in creating a lasting legacy’.

The www.PledgeMySeat.org site will be live on Friday 4th December to allow you to directly pledge your seat or find out more information about our campain.

 www.PledgeMySeat.org

Spread the word

Many thanks

The kick4change team

kick4change CIC Co Founders

Wednesday 21st October saw kick4change attend our first awards event.

We attended the Social Enterprise Yorkshire and Humber event in the knowledge we had been shortlisted in two catagories “Enterprise in Innovation” and “Social Entrepreneurs of the Year”.

We are proud to announce we scooped the “Innovation in Enterprise” accolade and were delighted to receive the trophy from the Big Issue Founder John Bird .

We hope this award recognition will give kick4change the foundation to promote our innovative social enteprise and allow us to further engage with schools, grass roots clubs and charities to develop the business and achieve our goals.

Many thanks to Tim Damer and David Hassall who encouraged us to enter and of course the judges who determined we were the eventual winners.

We had the pleasure of visiting South Otterington primary school today, a trip that was captured on North East Tonight, the local ITV news programme. The purpose of the trip was to give local children the opportunity to be the first to officially wear and own our 4sport football boots prior to our official UK launch next month.

We’re gratefull to James Lofthouse, an FA Skills coach, who put on a session and put the children through their paces. It was a great morning and the feedback we gained from the children was great! Head Teacher Mrs Williamson commented:

“We are really excited to have been involved in the trial of the new social enterprise football boots. The children have had a wonderful morning and thought that they were fantastic. We were particularly impressed that they had velcro fastenings, which will save precious football time. We will certainly be adding the products to our school uniform list!”

The event was also covered by both the Darlington & Stockton Times and the Northern Echo newspapers. Click on the links to view.

We hope to have a video of the TV footage to share in the near future. Should other schools or clubs wish to use our boots as a sustainable revenue stream, please contact us via this website.

Following a recent meeting with founder Nick Gates, we are pleased to announce a new charity partnership with Coaches Across Continents. Both parties have agreed to use kick4change’s boot libraries to benefit children as part of Coaches Across Continents work in Africa. Coaches Across Continents deservedly won the ‘Best New Project’ award at the inaugral Beyond Sport award evening in July 2009.

Coaches across Continents was launched in June 2008. Based on first –hand research in 65 countries in the past 7 years, Coaches across Continents developed a unique face-to face and on-line educational curriculum that uses soccer games to educate teachers/volunteers and children on health, leadership, life and social skills. Its projects are called ‘Hat-Trick Initiatives’ and take place over three years.

In year 1, local teachers and volunteers are trained by international coaches within their own communities to use the Coaches across Continents curriculum. This training is further developed each year for three consecutive years. In year 2, one coach from a local community is funded to travel and work in the UK or USA to gain cultural, social and soccer education to take back with them and inform their subsequent work within their own community. In year 3, fields and equipment plus school supplies are provided, so that local programmes become self sustainable by the local community. On-going and year-round mentoring utilising Coaches across Continents unique on-line curriculum ensures that all communities involved have support both throughout the Hat-Trick Initiative and in the years to follow, thus facilitating sustainability.

We look forward to building on our partnership in the coming months.

We had a surprise on opening the post this morning – confirmation that Kick4change had been shortlisted as a finalist for both the ‘Innovation in Enterprise’ category and for the ‘Social Entrepreneurs of the Year’ category for the Social Enterprise Awards Yorkshire and Humber 2009.

The awards, sponsored and organised by Business Link Yorkshire and supported by Yorkshire Forward have five award categories and we’ve been shortlisted for two of them. Each short list comprises four companies, so it will be a nail biting occasion for all concerned.

We are naturally delighted to be nominated for these awards, particularly so early on in the business and look forward to sharing details of the awards evening, held on Wednesday 21st October.

Wish us luck!