Earlier this month our charity launched a fundraising appeal to support a new ‘Ukraine Refugee Sports Project’. We hope to work with Polish communities to create safe play zones for young refugees on the Polish border.
Last week our CEO Andy Sellins and our Press and Communications Officer Nick Ames travelled to the Poland-Ukraine border where they met local partners and searched for locations to run the project from.
They identified a refugee camp in the Polish border town of Przemysl, where there is currently no sports provisions for Ukrainian refugee children and very little for them to do all day as they wait for transit to another country or other parts of Poland.
The town sits just 9-miles from the Ukrainian border and has seen an estimated 500,000 people pass through it in the last month. The train station is where female and child refugees from Kyiv or Lviv can finally feel safe, but they also remain extremely anxious for fathers, sons and husbands left behind to fight.
Andy shared: “It was great to see the kids running around outside and they were fun to coach. I asked them where they thought I was from and one of the cheekier ones said ‘Russia’. It will be great to get a team of our brilliant Coach Mentors into the camp in the coming days and for them to run dawn to dusk sport sessions and competitions. I’m sure the exhausted mums will be very happy to have a break.”
We are sending our coaches to train up and equip volunteers in the camp and then return every couple of weeks to assess how they are doing and to deliver more sports equipment to the camps. We also have long term plans to use the money we have raised for the project to expand into other camps across Europe. Please fine the donation link HERE.
To hear more about the project or to see how you can support the project please contact Andy Sellins.
