The Ulster Federation Clubs would like to welcome Claire Overend and Jayne Woodrow into their shared roll of Active Clubs Coordinator within the joint project between UFRC and Outdoor Recreation NI’s Walking In Your Community Scheme.

 

 

 

The two organisations joined together to apply to the Sport NI Active Clubs Fund, successfully receiving joint funding of £200.000 for the next 4 years.

The funding will help to continue the valuable work of the existing Walking in Your Community Scheme and help to develop Rambling Clubs across NI.

The funding from Sport NI requires UFRC to focus on groups within society who are generally under- represented in sporting clubs, including women, young people (18 to 25 years of age) and people from low income areas. That said, it is expect that new members will come from a wide spectrum of society.

Walking in Your Community is designed to get communities throughout Northern Ireland walking in their local area. Offering training and support to community walk leaders to start walking groups and deliver successful low-level walk programmes. Participants in these walking groups will be encouraged to sustain their interest in walking by joining UFRC clubs and inspiring them to tackle more challenging walks. For more information on this scheme please go to www.walkinginyourcommunity.com.

This partnership with the Walking in Your Community scheme will benefit UFRC and its members in several ways. For example clubs will have access to a numbers of training courses designed to increase ans sustain their membership. Small grants will be available to help with the purchase of equipment. Their should be improved communication and closer relationships between clubs. In addition Claire and Jayne will assist UFRC to target new areas not currently well served by clubs. A variety of initiatives are being developed to target the key groups and to determine the best ways to get people to join walking groups

As with any new funding evidence of how targets are being achieved must be shown and this will be done through quarterly monitoring. In the first instance we have to establish the existing membership profile of UFRC clubs and for this reason we are asking you to undertake a process of registration of your membership.

ORNI require a spreadsheet to be returned in June, September, December and March. After the initial form listing all members is completed, only new members need to be added plus the number of walks held each quarter.

Walking in Your community will be collecting and collating this data and will ensure that the information is held securely in line with its Date Protection Policies. . This information will only be used to report back against Sport NI monitoring targets and will enable Sport NI to understand what impact its funding is making.

This funding will enable walking to be developed in Northern Ireland and support local people to join clubs and discover the joys of walking outdoors.