The Campaign

New Beginnings - Fundraising for the future

The site was successfully purchased in 2008 from the Scout Association.

We want to allow more young people to use our site. 110,000 through-out the year is our target, with 85,000 presently visiting the site in mainly the summer months.

Longridge is a centre of inspiration and excellence for the advancement of education in water, outdoor and indoor activities for young people of all backgrounds and abilities. Our activities and operation is designed to promote the development of young people who use the site as volunteers or visitors allowing them to achieve their full physical, intellectual, social and spiritual potential as individuals, as responsible citizens and as members of their local, national and international communities.

We work in partnership with other charities and children service's teams to identify those young people that will most benefit from our training and create programmes that will inspire confidence and self-respect in young people that may have made some poor choices or not have had the best start in life.  As we are able to train up to instructor level in all of our sports, we train a high percentage of the UK's activity instructors - giving employment and opportunities to young people who may have failed to be inspired by conventional education.

For more young people to benefit from our activities we need to reinvigorate our facilities, which currently are tired, old, prone to flooding and in most cases just too small to service our existing visitors—let alone new ones! New facilities will encourage more adult and corporate use and this use will underwrite the activities for young people; in a nutshell the more businesses that use us the cheaper our provision will be to youth groups.

We have been awarded a £1m grant from Sports England which has enabled us to start the development of the centre but we need your help to complete it. We urgently need to raise an additional £90,000 to complete the building of our new training centre, which will enable us to put a floor and heating into the top floor and equip the training rooms to create an awesome year-round training facility.

All of our building projects will firstly have a function that will benefit and support the development of young people. However, they will have additional revenue streams, that will underwrite the use of the new facility by young people.

We also need to pay off the £800,000 loan that we took out to purchase the freehold of the site from The Scout Association, more about the campaigns to achieve our aims are detailed on the following pages. If you would like to know more about Longridge, our aims for the centre or how you can best support our plans, contact our Centre Director, Amanda Foister, amanda.foister@longridge-uk.org.