Everywhere We Go! – England, June (Donation 84)

The recipient of the 84th consecutive donation, to mark Scotland’s qualification for EURO 2020 were ‘KEEN London’ (https://www.keenlondon.org/)

We followed our previous process of donating to the host nation when our national team has qualified for a major tournament, which in this case, with the final being at Wembley, was England.

‘KEEN London’ is a charity in London providing one-to-one support at free sports and activity sessions for children with additional needs or disabilities. This group of children were suffering from isolation before the pandemic, but additional shielding and lockdowns has had an even greater impact.

Kirstie from KEEN London explains more about what they do:

‘Throughout lockdown (1, 2 and 3) we have continued to run services, our KEENTV live and interactive sessions (which just finished last week) and Bubble Buddies (check out the video https://youtu.be/C0eTE3Gwxfg) small supported social groups where we take children out with volunteers to access local parks, woodlands and open spaces. These are Covid secure and provide valuable respite to families who, in many cases have lost all the services and support over the last year or so.’

Your donation will help KEEN to open up activities to reach more children who would most benefit from one-to-one support (they have a long waiting list and continue to receive referrals).

They plan to reopen their large group sessions in North, South and East London as soon as this is possible and will be working over the coming months to contact families on the waiting list about starting with KEEN London.

The decision on what/when your donation would be used for, is made based on what is most needed at the time to ensure the work continues –  a good example being KEEN not anticipating having to buy laptops for running online sessions last March – other areas it could be used would include:
* the hire of the venues to run the sessions in (one of their biggest costs)
* cover the costs of DBS checks for new volunteers
* book outdoor sessions such as all ability cycling (very popular)
* keep the bubble buddy packs full of hand sanitiser, duck feed and face masks.

All in all, we hope you agree KEEN make a very worthy recipient, putting smiles on the faces of children is a fantastic aim to have!

#EverywhereWeGo