Iman Ogoo, Senior Project Coordinator at Jimmy Asher Foundation in Tooting, tells us about their new youth partnerships in Tooting and beyond, plus their steps towards greater opportunities for funding and support.

The Jimmy Asher Foundation team have formed a new partnership with our local youth centre, Tooting Hub. For 30 weeks we will deliver boxing training workshops for the young people that use the service, which is situated on Beechcroft Road, Tooting Bec. We’ll be holding a taster session at Tooting Hub during the half term school break on 22nd October at 1pm-2pm.
 

A new series of boxing sessions have started at the beginning of this month on Tuesday afternoons from 4pm-5.30pm at Pollards Hill Youth Centre. This is in addition to our regular Thursday evening boxing sessions, which run from 7.15pm-8.15pm. Our ongoing partnership with the Fulham FC Foundation has enabled us to continue providing the Thursday sessions and our brilliant inclusive boxing training sessions at The Old Library youth club in Lambeth until July 2020.

After several months of meetings with the Enrichment Team, we finally cemented our collaboration with South Thames College to deliver six-week sports programmes in basketball and football for their students. We hosted a stall at the college’s Fresher’s Fair in mid-September to introduce the Foundation and present information on the workshops. There was an excellent turn out at the stall, where our Co-Founder Joseph and Office Manager Maurice Burley engaged with many students. We were particularly pleased to see a significant amount of interest from young women wanting to participate in our girls football training held at the college on Tuesday lunchtimes.
 

Our other Co-Founder Tafari Samuel had further meetings with the London Youth Organisation last month, taking more steps towards acquiring their Bronze Quality Mark accreditation. It has been a lengthy process with Tafari and Maurice ensuring our Policies & Procedures and other essential documents are all up to date and accurate. Acquiring the London Youth Bronze Quality Mark will enable JAF to access more funding and support for future projects, so we are working hard to make this happen and look forward to completing the final assessment by the end of January 2020.

To find out more about volunteering or any other aspect of the Jimmy Asher Foundation, visit www.jimmyasherfoundation.org and follow them on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

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