The work of Preston North End and its charitable partner the Preston North End Community and Education Trust has been away from the core business of football during recent weeks.
With the continuing battle against COVID-19 going on around the world, the work of the club’s community outreach has played its part in the fight and continues to do so.
Already we have seen the Invincibles Pavilion handed over to the NHS to use for COVID-19 training on a weekly basis and the Sir Tom Finney car park also being used for vital anti-coagulant testing away from the hospital – click here for details of this.
Monday saw the start of the delivery of the Helping Hampers, announced a fortnight ago, which is being funded by big donations from players and management, as well as the public, plus most recently a grant from the Lancashire COVID-19 Community Support Fund and the National Emergencies Trust.
The Trust have also teamed up with Lancashire Police to deliver the Hampers, they are also providing the delivery team, including staff and a whole host of volunteers, with PPE.
The campaign has been gifted 200 boxes for our hampers by Ken Shackleton, the managing director at The Cardboard Box Company – you can read more about the Helping Hampers campaign by clicking here.
The weekend and the celebration of Gentry Day saw the mental wellbeing of our older supporters at the forefront of thinking, with a whole host of former players, current players and first team manager Alex Neil making phone calls to nominated fans over the age of 70 to check on them – you can see some of the footage from these calls and read more on this here.
Two other big charitable efforts have been the Trust’s continuing work with Preston’s homeless centre, the Foxton Centre, with thousands more pounds raised at the PNE Big Sleep In, with people getting in their sleeping bags during lockdown to raise vital funds – more on this here.
The second of those partnerships has seen the club working very closely to back the efforts of lifelong supporters Kenny Marland and his partner Joanne in their efforts to ‘Boot The Virus’, a campaign to raise money for the NHS charities by auctioning off donated pair of signed boots from professional footballers – if you can help, read the details of their efforts here.
As well as mental health, physical health and wellbeing work has continued as well. Our Trust’s courses have continued to run via online sessions with our Sporting Memories, Fit Fans, Veterans, Walking Football and many more all still running through the likes of Zoom and Microsoft Teams – check out the Trust website here for details of our offerings.
And we have even been getting regular exercise sessions for all the family, whatever age or fitness levels you have via our first team fitness coach Dr Tom Little, check out our social media accounts for the twice a week videos that have been sent in from home by Tom, they are also available on our YouTube channel here.
All of this is being done with the government’s message in mind of ‘Stay Home. Protect The NHS. Save Lives’.
If you want to help, volunteer for our Helping Hampers delivery programme or get involved in any of the schemes, you can contact community@pne.com.