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Our 2018 in review

It has been another brilliant year for the British Gymnastics Foundation. Thanks to the help of so many people, we’ve been able to continue changing lives through gymnastics; the best sport in the world.

We would like to everyone thank that has played a part, however big or small. Here is our year in review.

Our Hardship Grants prove to be a massive help to those who already do gymnastics, allowing them to continue to take part in the sport they love when times are particularly hard. Since the beginning of this programme, we’ve awarded £68,000 in funds, benefitting 189 British Gymnastics members, allowing them to stay in the sport. We also found that 98% of the recipients of the grants were found to still be in gymnastics 12 months later. 59% told us that it was likely that without the grant, they would’ve dropped out of gymnastics. This makes us incredibly proud to have made such a difference.

It has also been another successful year for fundraising. In the last 18 months we have raised almost £14,000 from people completing personal fundraising challenges. These range from Patrick, the head of our charity, taking on an ultra-marathon, Steve cycling the Liverpool Night Rider and Kim running two half marathons to name just a few.

Throughout July, we celebrated our birthday, with British Gymnastics clubs taking part in fundraising activities during the month. This helped to raise £600, but most importantly allowed us to connect with gymnastics clubs across the country, helping to raise awareness of what we do. Thank you to all of the clubs that got involved.

Providing families with brief respite having gone through very difficult times, our Inspirational Experiences programme has done amazing things in 2018. We were able to send a family to the 2018 Gymnastics British Championships in Liverpool, where they also got to meet double-Olympic champion Max Whitlock. Dan Purvis inspired disability gymnasts from across Scotland when he visited a club to assist with a disability gymnastics training camp for them. Claudia Fragapane also got involved, spending time in the gym with a gymnast who had recently lost her father, giving her a training session that she will never forget.

Our Love to Move programme continues to go from strength-to-strength. We have this year won our first contract with a Clinical Commissioning Group (Luton CCG) to deliver health outcomes. We are also very proud to have an offer of project funding from Sport Northern Ireland to develop the Love to Move Programme in another home country. Whilst all this is going on, we have been working hard to develop the Love to Move course for training practitioners, which is key to expanding the programme across the UK.

In addition to that, the Love to Move booklet which we released in 2017 as a free download, has now been downloaded an incredible 254,000 times.

We hope that you will continue to follow our story throughout 2019.