One of the primary objectives of Notts County Supporters Trust is to foster links between the club and the community it serves. Of course this is not a new idea. Historically, football clubs in the late Victorian and Edwardian era were set up primarily assporting and community institutions. Arsenal, for example, was initially conceived as an armaments factory team in Woolwich whilst Celtic was formed to alleviate poverty in Glasgow's East End.
More recent focus on the relationship between football clubs and their communities has been to some extent business or finance driven. Arising out of the financial difficulties faced by clubs have been examples of clubs embracing community ownership as a mechanism for delivering long-term financial stability. We can learn a considerable amount from the community delivery partnerships that have been developed by lower league clubs such as Brentford, Chesterfield and Lincoln. The former is owned by the supporters' trust, Bees United whose vision is to enable a sustainable future for their club as a valued and successful part of the community. Their work on developing Griffin Park into a community `hub' that provides a range of health, education, cultural and social services, including a multi-purpose learning zone, has made Brentford a nationally recognised model of best practice, and in March of 2006 were awarded the title of the Football League Community Club of the Year. Brentford's transformation has been remarkable and one wonders what could be achieved at Meadow Lane with the same enthusiasm, desire, and collective approach.
Since the Trust was formed in April 2003 our energies have understandably been focused on putting the club on a financially even keel. Subsequently our achievements in strengthening the bonds with the local community have been small scale – running one-off events such as the Open Day and the Big Draw, distributing tickets to local schools and community groups,and supporting the work of Kick Racism out of Football. It is hoped that the Trust's majority shareholding will bring a fresh impetus to our vision of developing Notts County into a community club, and help us in furthering our work with the local communities. In order to do this it is crucial that we have the `buy in' of the Chairman, the Chief Executive and the current Board of Directors. To this end the Trust is organising a presentation from a group of researchers who have recently completed a study commissioned by the Football Foundation into how football clubs and organisations interact with their local communities.
The report, `Football and its communities', was carried out over three years and is based on case studies of the relationships between three football clubs – Leeds United, Manchester City and Sheffield United – and their communities, as well as other communitysports programmes in those and other cities. The authors of the report highlight the importance of supporters being recognised as communities of fans who come together around football clubs and matches, demonstrating the game's ability to bring people together. Moreover, they stress that supporters are avaluable and often willing resource, and yet rarely actually engaged in clubs' community activities.
We have begun to address this by setting up a Community Sub-committee, tasked with looking at ways in which the Trust can work proactively with the club to increase its community profile within the Nottingham population, and engage with `hard to reach' groups that traditionally have been under-represented amongst the club's fan-base. If you have any ideas about how the Trust can engage withand involve the wider community of Nottingham, or can spare sometime to help the Trust then please e-mail community@... or contact the Trust's community officer David Hindley via the Trust desk on match days.
