The South London charity using sport as a vehicle for social change
On a rainy Monday night in Catford, southeast London, Kieran Connolly and his coaches oversee a football session of around 25 teenagers. If you turned up on a Wednesday in Lewisham, or a Friday in Bromley, you’d find a similar scene. Go back a couple of years to Bellingham and it would be the same.
Kieran Connolly is not just any football coach. He is the founder and CEO of Sports Fun 4 All, a charity that provides free football sessions for young people across south London. The charity uses the power of sport to improve the physical and mental health of young people, whilst keeping them in a safe environment and teaching them key life skills.
After launching in 2016, they have delivered over 1500 hours of free coaching, and are currently running 17 weekly sessions at 13 venues in five London boroughs: Bromley, Greenwich, Lambeth, Lewisham and Southwark. The charity is now the biggest provider of free football in London.
And yet, despite having around 300-400 young people per week attend the sessions, Sports Fun 4 All receives very little government funding. When the project initially launched, they received money from Lewisham Council, enough to run for twelve weeks.
When the funding finished, the sessions were so popular that Kieran felt obliged to continue them. In November, I went down to their Catford session to see first-hand the impact they have and to talk to Kieran about the journey he’s been on since then.
“Basically I had the decision to make, whether I carried it on or stopped it,” Kieran says, “and I didn’t really have any plans to carry it on, but the young people wanted to continue.”
“I’m very driven and very passionate about this. My whole thing is that I don’t want to stop any of our sessions. I take that so seriously. I don’t want to stop any of our sessions because of funding. If they stop because young people stop coming, that’s different.”
This drive is very evident when watching the session, as is the respect that Kieran commands from the kids. The reality is that the charity would not have had a future without his commitment and refusal to give up in the face of rejected funding applications.
“I’d say, like, 60, maybe 70% of my funding bids are unsuccessful”, he says. “Our level of investment that we’re receiving doesn’t match the work that we’re doing.”
“I would say some of those boroughs don’t even know what we’re doing.”
This is a stark admission when you consider that Lewisham Borough, where the charity conducts 10 of their 17 sessions, is the 8th highest local authority in England and Wales for the total number of violent offences committed by children. Trust for London estimates that up to a third of children in Lewisham live in poverty.
Kieran feels that those with responsibility for funding don’t appreciate the scale or value of the work that Sports Fun 4 All does. “I think you need to have people looking at the bids that understand the work. And I just think a lot of the time the people don’t actually understand the work.
“If they don’t value sport, or don’t value football, they might look at this and just think it’s a football team. We’re way more than a football team.”
“Football is just the vehicle that I use, because I know that’s the best way to engage young men in inner city communities, which is who the majority of our participants are.”
However, as big an issue as the lack of funding is, tied into that is the lack of facilities available to use for young people to play football, either as an organised session or just for a kickabout with their friends.
“I think whatever funding they put into youth services and all these different things, I think if you haven’t got facilities, it doesn’t matter”, Kieran says.
“There’s this Ian Wright and David Rocastle pitch that got opened on the BBC, November 2022 by Ian Wright, it’s now about to be November 2024 and it’s still not available for us to hire?”
A report published by the GMB trade union found that nearly 1000 council-owned football pitches have been sold off in the UK since 2010.
Combined with cuts to youth services more broadly, the results have had a devastating impact on local communities far beyond sport, with few spaces for young people to socialise outside of school hours.
This is where the work that Sports Fun 4 All does is so important, Kieran emphasises: “Providing these places that are very close to where they live, they haven’t got to travel too far.”
He also stresses the importance of floodlit facilities. “This time of year, it’s getting dark half four, five o’clock, the streets are a dangerous place. They’re not really a safe space for young people, young men or young women.”
Charities like Sports Fun 4 All will not solve crime in south London on its own. But they do keep young people in a safe, protected environment on weekday evenings, when schools have often abdicated their extra-curricular duty to their pupils due to funding constraints.
“I don’t think schools are very outward facing,” says Kieran. “I think they forget that young people go to school from 9am to 3pm and then there’s a whole another life once they leave those school gates.”
The venue where I interviewed Kieran in Catford was available to Sports Fun 4 All as part of a partnership with St. Dunstan’s College, a local private school, to use their pitches once a week. While he is grateful for the outreach from St. Dunstan’s, the facility was previously the publicly-owned Catford Pitz, and freely available for anyone in the community to use.
Another key part of Sports Fun 4 All’s mission is to develop soft skills and provide career pathways for its coaches. The charity’s coaches are all FA-qualified and grew up in southeast London, so are able to relate to the young people who are part of their sessions.
“They’re not coming as like the finished product with someone that might come to you at 26 and has graduated, done a few years in an entry level job,” Kieran says. “I’m literally having to teach them everything.”
The coaches are reaping the benefits of Kieran’s investment in them, no one more so than lead coach Elias Fazli. Born in Denmark to Afghani refugee parents, he arrived in the UK aged 10 and began coaching with Sports Fun 4 All as a volunteer aged 16.
He now leads sessions on his own and is taking a sports management course at Westminster University to pursue his dream of coaching, and was recently nominated for the StreetGames UK Coach/Volunteer of the Year award. Kieran says it is “almost a disservice” to call him a young person, given his level of maturity.
The partnership with the Metropolitan Police Youth Engagement Team is another example of the vital community work that Sports Fun 4 All do. After an incident at one of their sessions, Kieran decided that it would be beneficial to introduce the young people to police officers in a less formal environment.
Having grown up Catford, he was all too aware of the difficult relationship that exists in these parts between the police and the local community.
“You probably get some youth workers that are kind of anti-police,” says Kieran, “And with me, I just know how our community think of the police, and I feel like we have a responsibility as responsible adults, to try and do what we can to break down those barriers.”
The idea was to bring officers down to the session in plain clothes, to speak to the young people about their stop and search rights, and to humanise them when many of their first interactions with the police have been negative. Some of the young people present had in fact encountered the officers just a few days earlier.
“People are going to think how they’re going to think,” Kieran explains, “but at least if we can do a little bit and try and change a little bit of the image, and think, oh, you know what, he’s a police officer, but he’s cool. He’s cool for a police officer.”
It’s a part of his message that he continually reinforces to the kids during his sessions: that actions have consequences. “There’s different types of stupid decisions,” he goes on, “where you went out and drunk too much. And then there’s stupid decisions where somebody got seriously injured.”
Reflecting on my time with Kieran, it is difficult to understand why people do not see value in these sort of projects. Sports Fun 4 All is truly rooted in its local community, providing a service free of charge to local young people and run by coaches who all grew up in the area.
In my personal opinion, it is reflective of the political class in this country as a whole that they continue to fail to see the value that sport can provide for positive social change.
It may not alleviate poverty entirely, but it massively benefits physical and mental health, teaches key life skills as being part of a team and can give young people a real purpose that draws them away from getting involved with some bad people.
More generally, the failure to provide more funding for initiatives like these reflects a cross-party establishment that for too long has been focused on pinching pennies here and there instead of investing in the futures of its young people.
If you would like to support the work that Sports Fun 4 All do, you can donate here: https://localgiving.org/fundraising/Sports-Fun-4-All-be203b7535
To find out more about the charity, visit their website sportsfun4all.com
To listen to a longer-form interview with Kieran, a podcast feature can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Xykg7FV8aPNqUZ44SBc1o?si=dc65cf3c21b24a1e
