Football As A Force For Good / Liverpool’s Big Impact
Presented By Geoff Wilson Consultancy
Liverpool FC’s commitment to supporting the local community has been independently valued at £23m during a 12-month period 2020/21. fcbusiness spoke to, Matt Parish, Chief Executive at the club’s official charity, LFC Foundation to find out more about their work and their plans going forward.
What is the scope of Liverpool FC Foundation’s work?
As the club’s official charity so we cover work in six areas: Health & Wellbeing; Education & Life Skills; Youth Interventions; Training; Community Engagement; Sport & Physical Activity.
Because we’re not a single cause charity you can get a bit lost if you try to explain to people you’ve got over 35 programmes running so we’ve done a lot of work distilling what we do and brought them down into those six impact areas.
The focus our work is primarily across the Liverpool city region and its most deprived areas. Our over-arching mission is to use the power of the badge and the LFC family to create life-changing opportunities for the most underserved communities both home and away.
We recognise, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of the fact that we are the Foundation of a global football club but we’ve worked really hard over the last 3 years to make sure our work, that we deliver locally is at the right level but there is still much more to do.
An independent impact report last season showed that 75% of our sessions are delivered in the top 20 most deprived urban wards in the UK and 50% of our sessions are in the top 10 most deprived wards in the UK. That illustrates some of the need in our region.
During the 20/21 season we supported over 50,000 individuals and well over 85% of those were here in the Liverpool city region.
With Everton just across the park, how do you distinguish between what you are doing and what they are doing?
I spent nearly 20 years working at Charlton Athletic Community Trust in South East London and then I worked for Burnley FC in the Community. In London the Boroughs are almost divided up amongst the clubs and they work within those boundaries.
Yes, the two clubs are close but football is such a big part of the landscape here, plus there is so much need that even if both clubs and Tranmere doubled what they did we probably still wouldn’t meet it all. We have commonality in some of our Premier League funded programmes such as Premier League Kicks, Primary Stars and other football programmes they run. We will both deliver these but we’ll do so slightly differently.
But we’ve also got points of difference too. Everton have their own Free School, whereas we look to work with High Schools in Liverpool, Sefton and Kirkby and we provide alternative provision and support those pupils that otherwise may end up outside mainstream education.
We do similar work and on some projects, we do work in partnership and there’s talk at the moment with both Everton and Tranmere Rovers about working together collectively. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
Are there programmes LFC Foundation has carried out we can look at more deeply and the impact they have had?
One is our employability programme which we call Works. The funding for that was coming to an end but unemployment and youth unemployment in Liverpool, as it is in many major cities in the UK, is a real issue. So we’ve diversified by working in partnership with funding partners and we were fortunate to be successful in our application for a large grant from the Steve Morgan Foundation who is one of the largest third sector funder in this region.
With that funding we were able to expand the Works programme and we were able to get further funding from the PFA to deliver a Sports Works programme and deliver a programme – Youth Works in partnership with Liverpool City Council which sees us train young people and employ them as apprentices in youth clubs across the City.
Youth services have been decimated by austerity over the years but they provide such a vital service. How can we support those youth providers that are still standing? Going forward can we take the risk of taking on the staff member and convert that apprentice in the youth club into a permanent job to develop the service.
In three years we have transformed that programme and it now has a budget of around £0.5m and five staff. We’re also about to launch it in New Jersey & New York and also run some mentoring work via the club’s London office.
Another project we’re proud of is our Community Well-Being Hubs. The model is that rather than owning and taking on multiple facilities we look to work in partnership with existing centres and support them. We have lots of other providers come in, we’re not trying to say we’re specialists in everything. Our main base at the Anfield Sports & Community Centre is a great example of that, they are a Charity in their own right, we are tenants there and deliver lots of initiatives but there’s also a dance group there, community sport, youth provision, a non-league football club that play on the 3G there so there’s a real mix.
We also run our employability and mental health programmes, sport and physical activity in local primary schools and work in partnership with the Robbie Fowler Football Academy to deliver post-16 education programmes there.
As part of the grant from the Steve Morgan Foundation which was matched by the DCMS, we were able to partner with five other existing community venues. So we don’t take them over, we become partners and from those venues we deliver all of our activity and we also work with them to bring in other funding to develop what they do.
We focus on areas of high need but use the power of the LFC badge to support others and to harness funding. As one of the bigger size charities in the area you can drain funding from others so we try to do it the other way round and try to empower others and bring in funding that they would benefit from. It’s only 18 months old that project but it seems to be working really well.
LFC Foundation has a strong board of Trustees – how important are they in the work that you do?
I think we’ve got a really good mix of Trustees. We’ve got both club and independent Trustees and in my experience you need that balance of influence and expertise. We’re very fortunate that we’ve got the club CEO, Billy Hogan as a Trustee and Susan Black who is the Director of Communications at the club but is also a Non-executive director of LFC women’s team as well as Gavin Laws, a former senior executive at Standard Charter Bank as independent chair of Trustees.
Crucially having a strong board of independent Trustees is important as they help to ensure that as the club’s foundation we are independent and as a charity we have that independent influence as well. The Trustees employ me and the team to run the organisation and they’re there to provide guidance and support and financial rigour.
What are the Foundation’s plans for the future?
We have five things that we want to achieve at the Foundation by 2025. In 2021 we supported 50,000 people; by 2025 we want to support 150,000 beneficiaries. We feel passionately that there are areas that we can be the experts and deliver programmes in but also there are areas where partner organisations are better placed and if we can generate funding to support them then we’ll do that.
We want to develop further across the Liverpool city region and be embedded in all the communities where there is highest need by 2025. Looking internationally, we are delivering a programme called Side By Side, in partnership with Right To Play for people overseas that is currently being delivering in Hong Kong and Thailand. This is in addition to our employability programme in New York but we also want to be in at least five different countries internationally by 2025.
Our independent review mapped out the sustainability goals which should we delivered a social return on investment of £23m in value for the Liverpool city region and for every £1 invested the return was £15. We want to keep driving that.
We want to work in the areas of highest need. The beauty of the football club is they have supporters all around the world but we still want to use our mantra of working in the local community.
To read the LFC Foundation’s Impact Report 2021 in full, please visit: foundation.liverpoolfc.com/about-us/season-review
