Greenhouse: Growing Olympic dreams

As Britain basks in Olympic glory post-Beijing, there is an increasing worry about funding for grassroots sport in this country.

Team GB’s Olympic success has enthused a whole generation of children to take up sport all over the country. But there are problems—lack of facilities and lack of suitable training mean that some people miss out on the benefits that sports can bring.

Sir John Major, who introduced lottery funding for athletes in the mid 1990s when he was prime minister, says that it is crucial that we continue to fund the ‘grassroots of sports’ because that is where Olympians come from. Chris Hoy, Britain’s most successful Olympian in Beijing, had barely stepped down from the podium before he was arguing that track racing at grassroots level needs more resources.

NPC believes that funding sports activities in local communities has benefits beyond nurturing future Olympic talent: sport is beneficial to children’s health and teaches them how to be part of a team, as well as helping them to make friends and become more confident.

Greenhouse Schools Project, an NPC charity recommendation in After the bell, our report on out of school hours activities, provides top quality sports coaching to children in inner-city areas. Michael de Giorgio, a former banker, founded the charity in 2002, initially to allow underprivileged children to make the most of independent schools’ unused playing fields. Six years on, Greenhouse runs sports activities in the school term and during holidays using not only independent schools’ facilities, but also those within state schools and community groups.

As well as being a grassroots charity, Greenhouse is a possible source of future Olympians. It expects children to work hard at their sport and takes a tough line on misbehaviour. For those talented young people who show real promise, it is able to offer elite training in some sports.

Greenhouse’s successes speak for themselves: from the hundreds of young people turning up at 7am each day for coaching in sports such as basketball, to the young table tennis players who have gone on to play at regional and national level. Greenhouse shows that sports can be fun, open to all and still be top quality.

NPC plans to further investigate the difference that charities make to people’s lives through the use of sport. This report on sports charities follows a similar vein to our previous report, Striking a chord, which explored how charities use music to reach disadvantaged groups.If you would like to speak to someone about funding NPC to carry out this research, please contact John Copps on 020 7785 6318 or jcopps@philanthropycapital.org.

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