Joins Tour de force

The SPFL Trust promote football as a force for good across all of Scotland’s communities.

And the Sunday Mail is backing their new Trusted Trophy Tour and ambitious target for SPFL clubs to engage with one million people in Scotland by 2022.

The tour is visiting 20 venues across the country to shine a light on the incredible work clubs are involved in off the ppark .

From grassrootsoots sport and mentalal hea l th programmes to schemes that support employability or target anti-social behaviour,ur, the campaign will highlight how clubs in Scotland change people’s lives every day.

SPFL Trust general manager Nicky Reid said: “Clubs are able to access people who don’t respond to traditional programmes of activity.

“When we reach them we are able to support significant life changes.”

Here’s the first of MailSport’s six-week diary on the road with the Tour:

Stop No.1: Big Hearts Community Trust

Big Hearts Community Trust are one of the SPFL’s longest-serving charities and their programme around Kinship Care is considered “best in class”.

Delivered in partnership with Mentor Scotland, Kinship Care is where children are looked after by someone who is a family member but not a parent.

This will usually be a grandparent, an informal arrangement borne out of necessity, often in tragic circumstances.

When this programme launched at Hearts, Big Hearts discovered dozens of grandparents who didn’t even realise they were Kinship Carers.

Big Hearts run afterschool clubs, advice forums for carers, a befriending service involving Hearts supporters as volunteers and advocacy campaigns. They will also shortly launclaunch a crisis gragrants scheme. At Tynecastle, JoJoJo, three, aand Skye, seseven, had a baball this week, dancingda on the p i t ch wi th f irst- teamt stars EEsmaell GGoncalves and Malaury Martin.

Jambos legend John Robertson, who attends the after-school club, said: “It has done wonders for the kids’ confidence.”

Stop No. 2: The SPFL Trust with Celtic, Clyde, Livingston and Motherwell

Next we visited Hampden Park for a celebration event that coincided with the Youth Engagement League project, funded by Erasmus.

Promot ing social engagement, and good physical and mental health, YEL aims to improve educat ion attainment for young people potentially at risk.

This is achieved through a football programme for boys and girls aged from nine to 14 and engaging in a social action project that supports local issues.

Around 80 kids were rewarded for taking part in the programme.