Paul’s Foundation on a mission to unite communities in East Lancashire

The Paul Hunter Foundation has been successful in bids for the Well Being, Prevention, and Early Help Service formerly known as the Young People’s Service Mini Competitions for BME Youth Work in Burnley, Pendle, Hyndburn, Rossendale and Preston areas.

This innovative proposal from the Paul Hunter Foundation has been put together with the support of young representatives of the BME community and NLTG.

It supports an inclusive approach to bringing communities together through snooker via the Foundation’s activities.

Before his passing in October 2006, Paul Hunter pioneered snooker’s development within Europe establishing a professional snooker event in 2004 which is now called the Paul Hunter Classic. Paul’s Foundation has pioneered grass roots snooker across the UK led by Chris Lovell and the team supported by NLTG. Snooker itself has exploded across Europe in the last five years with full and extensive coverage on Eurosport with growth being particularly strong in Poland, Germany, Latvia and Portugal with snooker being transmitted into 120 million homes.

Snooker strives to give the young people involved the opportunity to develop and improve their confidence, learn and enhance a new skills through snooker, support the development and application of their maths skills, develop relationships with other people that are able bodied, disadvantaged and in some instances of an authoritative nature in order to increase their self-worth and contribution to society.

In each area there will be a 15 session programme for young people to attend, each session will last for 2 hours and will be flexible to meet the needs of the area and will be held in local community venues allowing the provision to be delivered in the evenings, at weekends or during holiday periods.

Each young person that completes the programme will receive a snooker cue and case. All young people will have the opportunity to take part in weekly bite sized fun sport activities including mini competitions such as sixty second challenge, team relay games and shoot out snooker applying the proven model used previously within Lancashire and throughout the county since 2008.

Progress and attitude will be awarded as ‘Star of the Night’ certificates will be issued to celebrate supplementary achievements of effort, sportsmanship and supporting others. Opportunities will exist to lead small activities under full supervision for young people who excel and show potential in the initial stages of leadership.

All young people will have the opportunity to achieve an accreditation in Basic Snooker Skills from the profession’s National Governing Body, the WPBSA, with a targeted 80% achievement rate.

Support will be sourced within the local communities to support any specialist needs or barriers to participation by young people that want to attend.

During the sessions invitations to the police, drugs awareness and sexual health teams will be made to enable young people to feel comfortable and confident to access these services in a relaxed environment.

Expert delivery will be given by the Paul Hunter Foundation team on snooker skills together with information, advice and guidance provided by qualified skilled professionals throughout the programme with regards to employability skills and also signposting to a positive outcome of FE, jobs, apprenticeships or a programme of study.

Celebration events will be held during the early part of November featuring six times World Snooker Champion Steve Davis who will join the team and visit each area to meet the young people taking part and support any community initiatives where possible.

On behalf of the Foundation, Chris Lovell said, “This is a valuable piece of work during challenging times for these communities. Snooker has always been an inclusive sport that’s welcomed anyone to take part. The successful achievement of these projects is down to the hard work of all the team during the past years, the partnerships developed in the communities and the support of NLTG, LCC, World Snooker and the WPBSA. Our vision is to bring the people of Lancashire together and everyone is already looking forward to meeting Steve in November, it’s given them all something to build up to and look forward to.”

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