Street League Announces Launch in North East of England
Monday 23rd March saw the official announcement of Street League’s exciting new partnership with Sports Universities North East England (SUNEE). As part of Street League’s vision to transform the lives of disadvantaged adults across the UK, the partnership will mean an expansion to the North East of England.
The partnership was announced at SUNEE’s conference at Newcastle University and was attended by Olympian & Sunderland University Chancellor Steve Cram and 2018 Ambassador Richard Caborn. Workshops were delivered by both SUNEE and Street League, including former participants of the programme in Glasgow and London.
Street League is entering into an exciting stage of national development, supported by the Football Foundation and Sport Relief to replicate the already successful work in London and Glasgow in a new region. The Football Foundation considers Street League to be its ‘Flag Ship’ development through football social inclusion project and has supported SL to identifying the North East as a priority area for this programme.
A detailed consultation process was conducted over the last nine months to ensure that activity in the North East would be entirely complimentary to existing service provision. A steering group was established with local partners leading to the identification of SUNEE as an ideal partner for SL’s work.
SUNEE brings together the sports deparmnets of the universities of Durham, Newcastle, Northumberland, Sunderland and Teeside. For the past two years they have been running their ‘Second Chance’ programme, a football & multi-sports programme delivered by students to Drug Intervention and homeless clients across the North East. According to Neil Hurran, the Regional Coordinator for SUNEE, the partnership with Street League will have massive benefits - "All involved with SUNEE are very excited about the new partnership with Street League. The launch, as part of the inaugural SUNEE conference, was the first step in announcing our plans and went extremely well. 230 delegates attended, and we hope that we can use the impetus created by the day to hit the ground running with the new initiative."
Charlie Gamble, Street League’s Head of National Development, reflected on a successful start, “The day itself was a huge success and we are very proud to be working in partnership with the universities in the North East. We are very excited by the possibilities this partnership brings and would like to thank SUNEE for all their hard work in staging the conference.”
Damian Hatton, Street League’s founder and CEO, stated, “Street League’s vision is to transform the lives of young people and adults across the UK and the partnership with SUNEE represents the start of a process of national rollout. We would like to express our thanks to the Football Foundation and Sport Relief, whose funding has made this possible. This is the start of a big year for Street League.”
Speakers at the conference - Richard Caborn, Steve Cram, Charlie Gamble, Damian Hatton