Citizenship Awards: Programme Winners

In addition to shortlisting the clubs, the judges during the first stage of the Parliamentary Citizenship Awards also chose the winners of three awards for individual programmes.


Judges at the assessment stage.

The SportBusiness CSR Award is a new award this year run in conjunction with SportBusiness magazine. It’s designed to reward the efforts of the club with the best community marketing scheme helping to generate tangible brand or business results. This year’s winner is Saracens for their two year Dance programme which has seen over 16,000 children and young people trial dance classes. The judges commended it for its ‘clear focus’, the ‘scale of its reach’ and its ability to ’meld private and public sector’ agendas.

Miriam Sherlock, the editor of SportBusiness, said:

In a particularly strong field it was the Saracens Dance programme that proved to be the most remarkable. Reaching out to those outside of rugby’s usual audience Saracens worked hard in gaining large numbers of involved youngsters in a scheme that gives positive and tangible results in increased sponsorship, ticket sales and in revenue from holiday camp schemes. As well as providing fitness and health benefits it also encouraged a strong link to the team through work with the match day cheerleaders and subsidised tickets and promotions. There is no doubt that some youngsters on this programme will become lifelong Saracens fans. A big well done to all the staff and volunteers who clearly work so hard on this.’

This was the second year for the Innovation Award, which celebrates a new community programme that deals innovatively with a community’s social (and other) needs, and for the second year Bristol Rugby won, this time for its ‘Bright Sparks’ programme. ‘Bright Sparks’ is designed to help educational establishments which have chronic issues with absenteeism and truancy. The judges were impressed by the way the programme addressed a clear need in schools, with clear goals and measurable results.

The third Individual programme award is the Impact Award, which celebrates an established programme that is clearly able to demonstrate the positive impact it’s made on a particular issue (such as health or fitness) or on a particular community. This year’s award was given to Worcester Warriors for their ‘npower Tag’ programme which is aimed at children with special needs giving them the opportunity to learn and participate in sport. The judges were impressed by the programme’s scale and by Worcester’s well-developed overall strategy for achieving community goals.

Congratulations to the winners and best of luck to the shortlisted clubs (Northampton Saints, Saracens and Worcester Warriors) will be presenting their work to the final judging panel at Parliament next week.

Posted by Wayne | April 23, 2009 | Filed Under CSR 

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