Sport England has joined forces with Crowdfunder to launch a new initiative: Active Together will make £1 million of match funding available to help the sport and physical activity sector through the ongoing coronavirus crisis, and is now open for applications.
Sport England is encouraging not-for-profit organisations who play an important role in keeping their community physically active to get involved. If your sports club has had to cease operations due to the ongoing pandemic and in doing so is experiencing short-term financial difficulty, follow the link on the Crowdfunder website to start setting up a crowdfunding campaign and apply for up to £10,000 match funding today.
Bures Dragon Archery Club in Essex is signed up to the Crowdfunder campaign. Founded seven years ago, the Bures Dragons are a friendly, fun group of people committed to keeping the elegant sport of traditional longbow alive. As it says in their mission statement: ‘Longbow archery has survived the invention of gunpowder, the creation of the modern compound bow and even Hollywood misrepresentation. It can survive COVID-19 too! If you can help, please donate to keep this heritage sport alive'.
Mark Bloom, Chairman of Bures Dragons Archery Club, said: Â"For traditional clubs, accessing mainstream funding has ever been a challenge, so we were overwhelmed with the support shown by the community in helping us to weather this storm, especially when many people are in difficult positions themselves.
Â"We would absolutely recommend that any club struggling in the current climate applies for the Sport England emergency fund too: the process is easy and could make all the difference to you. Thanks to everyone who donated; our club is able not only to pay its rent over the next few months, but also to buy some new targets for our indoor, outdoor and field ranges. We can't wait to open again and get shooting once it's safe.”
Sport England also have a series of sport specific webinars delivered by Crowdfunder to support their initiative.
The next session is Tuesday 16 June. It's a free, 30 minute session designed to be interactive and will explain how crowdfunding works. It will be recorded for future viewing which people will need to sign up for in order to access.
There will be additional, similar webinars in the future on:
They will appear in the dedicated ‘Crowdfund Sport' page; details are in the ‘Join us for an interactive session' box as well as appearing at the bottom of the page. Linked to this, Sport England has also tasked Crowdfunder with coming up with online course content, on which people can enrol via the Crowdfunding for sports: Online course section.
If your club has struggled to get short-term funding during the pandemic, Active Together could be the answer. Sport England will match up to £10,000 of a successful campaign. If you have already started a crowdfunding campaign you can apply for the match funding via your Crowdfunder dashboard. So, see if you're eligible and start your application!
