2021 at the Aston Villa Foundation

2021 was an incredible year for the Aston Villa Foundation, with thousands of people across Birmingham supported by our charitable programmes and initiatives.

Over the last twelve months, throughout the pandemic, the Aston Villa Foundation has continued to provide support to vulnerable participants across our sessions, by delivering in either virtual sessions or physical when allowed by Government guidelines.

The Foundation mobilised quickly to address needs identified as a result of the pandemic, including through Villa Kitchen, our hot food initiative which previously just provided hot meals to homeless organisations and housing associations but was expanded to feed school children whose families were financially impacted by the pandemic but were not eligible for free school meals.

Staff continued to provide support to children and adults with disabilities through our Ability Counts sessions, providing virtual support and physical sessions where possible to ensure that all participants were supported through the challenging months of Covid.

The Foundation has continued to deliver free to access sport and youth group sessions in partnership with the Premier League in the city's priority areas, ensuring that hard-to-reach youngsters in some of the most high-need areas were provided with guidance and offered support and opportunities to move onto a positive pathway. We have continued to support vulnerable young people entering and in criminal justice system through our Villa Intervention Programme, working with young people on a 1:1 basis to provide guidance, offer support and create opportunities for young people to move onto a positive pathway.

Covid-19 left a lot of people unemployed and struggling to find new opportunties. We have consistently looked to fill skills gap areas and support industries that were negatively impacted by the pandemic, and have expanded our programmes over the last 12 months to do this. The Foundation launched the Villa Catering Club in partnership with Digbeth Dining Club to help support young people looking to find work in the hospitality industry, and to help provide an industry that has struggled as a result of the pandemic with qualified potential employees. SCORE was also launched in partnership with Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust to help people gain the qualifications and experience needed to gain work in the Health and Social Care industry, another industry put under a lot of strain as a result of the pandemic.

The Foundation further supported the NHS by partnering with the Liaison and Diversion team from Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust to create a new Youth Mentor role. It was identified that there are a lot of young people in the local community who would benefit from longer term support and mentoring, to help reduce re-offending by sourcing diversionary activities in the local community. This innovative partnership between Aston Villa and the NHS is the first of its kind and will hopefully make a massive difference to the young people of Birmingham and Solihull.

The pandemic negatively impacted many people's mental health, and TeamWork was launched to support fans and the local community with their mental health through digital and physical activations. The programme has supported fans through football sessions, workshops, drop-in sessions with qualified mental health professionals and through the promotion of mental health guidance and resources on social media, plus much more. The programme has been supported by His Royal Highness The Duke of Cambridge and Aston Villa Captain Tyrone Mings over the last 12 months.

Villa Vision was launched in partnership with Aston University, Essilor, the Premier League and the PFA over the last 12 months, aiming to educate children on the importance of caring for your eyes and the impact it can have on your life. The project is the first of its kind in the UK and sees a fully qualified optometrist visiting local schools to conduct eye screening tests on local children, using a fully kitted optometry van to do this. In the last 12 months, the programme has engaged with and inspired over 1800 children through interactive workshops. Over 1500 local primary school children have been vision and colour vision screened and nearly 100 fully comprehensive eye tests have been completed, around half of which had an uncorrected prescription and around a quarter were found to have an undiagnosed colour vision deficiency. Over 100 pairs of glasses have been produced and provided to those children requring them.

The programme was supported by His Royal Highness The Duke of Cambridge and Aston Villa Captain Tyrone Mings over the last 12 months, with the former meeting with Foundation staff to discuss the innovative programme and its benefits.

We have expanded our work in local schools over the last 12 months and have worked with 65 primary and secondary schools across Birmingham, providing alternative provision and mainstream classroom educational programmes across National Curriculum subjects through a holistic schools offer, using kinaesthetic learning and the power of the football club to engage children in a variety of subjects. We have also added a STEM programme, in collaboration with Millennium Point, onto our schools offering to help educate children in science, technology, engineering and maths, to help provide children with the skills of the future.

Throughout the pandemic the Foundation has kept all staff employed and paid in full, and has actually grown by 20%, expanding departments as much as we have expanded our offer of programmes and projects. The last 12 months has been one of resilience and growth, and we have consistently shown innovation and continued to support the most vulnerable people across the city.