Our local delivery partners Fight 4 Change have emerged stronger from the pandemic by moulding their programmes to meet the increased needs of young people.

Fight 4 Change founder, Rebecca Donnelly MBE, has seen with her own eyes how Covid-19 has disproportionately affected the under-privileged young people she and her staff work with at their boxing club in south east London. But she says young people’s recent hardship has forced her into adapting some programmes to meet acute demand, which she feels will benefit participants moving forward.

Fight 4 Change’s ‘Saved By The Bell’ programme is one example. The organisation works with local schools, Pupil Referral Units, behavioural units, Youth Offending Teams and the Metropolitan Police to identify young people who require interventions and increased support. Pre-Covid, participants would come into the gym for a combination of boxing, fitness, workshops, employability support and tutoring. That face-to-face contact and indoor physical activity obviously wasn’t possible during lockdown.

Gym staff and police officers instead visited young people at home. Some were in unenviable situations. One was a 15-year-old with known anger issues sharing a bedroom in a two-bed flat with his much younger sister; another was a teenager in a high-rise flat who is one of five siblings, all sharing one laptop for home schooling. In these scenarios it’s no surprise that schools were flagging up their lack of engagement in academic work.

“You hear about these situations, but seeing it with your own eyes when you visit is like, ‘Oh my God,’” says Rebecca. "There needed to be an outlet there for these young people but there just wasn’t.”

Due to the restrictions, these individuals couldn’t come into the gym for support, so gym staff took them into local parks for exercise, set them fitness goals and did mentoring and counselling in the open air. But more support was needed.

Rebecca explains: “We completely turned the programme around. We approached one of the behaviour units we worked with and asked them, ‘What do you need most?’ They told us what young people needed most was counselling.”

Luckily two Fight 4 Change staff had been undergoing counselling training as well as the Levelling the Playing Field Level 3 trauma-responsive mentoring qualification. Other staff have lived experience which is hugely valuable.

“It has completely changed the whole scope of our programme and we now have a part-time counsellor with us,” says Rebecca. “Now restrictions have eased, kids aged 12-16 on that programme come into the gym in the evenings for a counselling session, tutoring support and boxing.

“We know boxing works well with the clients we work with, but when it’s taken away and you haven’t got that tool to use, you have to rely on other things. It’s made us realise how effective mentoring and counselling can be when the sport and physical activity aren't possible.

“Now the emphasis has flipped on its head. Before lockdown, they’d be coming in for boxing sessions and we’d set them goals based on their education and behaviour at school. Now, we have less control over their educational attainment – we certainly can’t control how many laptops they have in the household – so the goals we set are based around fitness, which they completed in the local park. That way, we do at least have a certain amount of control over their mental strength and relieving some of the pressure they’re under.”

Rebecca approached local schools during the second lockdown in January and they referred 15 children who were on their welfare concern list with issues such as gang activity, self-harm, mental health and being on the verge of exclusion due to behaviour. “They were throwing referrals at us,” says Rebecca.

Since then, they have had another 10, although some of the original referrals have now left the programme and just engage in boxing, counselling and/or mentoring.

“If something positive has come out of Covid, I’d say that it has changed and expanded our programmes and I think the way we do it now is better,” Rebecca states. “We’ve built up a much stronger relationship with the referral agencies and the school.

“The schools have got to deal with Covid tests, isolating kids, staffing issues and educating pupils who are already behind in their learning, never mind their involvement in gangs and county lines. For them, having us there for additional support - that they don’t have to pay for - is a real benefit.”

Now restrictions have been eased, the gym (based at the Black Prince Hub in Lambeth) has re-opened and face-to-face sessions, pad work and sparring have resumed, including Fight 4 Change’s two Levelling the Playing Field sessions.

The sessions use the power of boxing, physical activity and mentoring in alignment with LtPF’s common goals:

• Increase the number of ethnically diverse children taking part in sport and physical activity
• Prevent and divert ethnically diverse children from being involved with the Criminal Justice System

“I think they’re delighted to be back,” says Rebecca. “I’ve been reading a lot about young people’s resilience, but I think they’ve been hit quite hard.

“The gym is quite a social place to see your mates and that lack of positive interaction has been hard, but they’ve also missed the release mechanism of hitting the pads. It helps them control their emotions. Also when it comes to behaviour, the coach saying to them, ‘Think before you do that’ has put a sense of calm back into what’s been an erratic time for them.

“The kids’ relief that the gym is back open is much more than a middle-class white person who is glad their gym is back open so they can pull some weights. It means more to these young people because of the situation they’re in.”

Read more about Fight 4 Change and Levelling the Playing Field here.