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The Charity - Longridge On The Thames

New Beginnings - Fundraising for the future - £3m target

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. Our aim is to create a thriving year-round centre that creates opportunities for all of our young people to develop new skills and grow in charachter and with confidence.  With unemployment so high at the moment, it is vital that we create positive, safe environments that will allow our young people to thrive and learn new skills.  Longridge offers just that environment and with your support will be able to offer even more young people the opportunity to start their adult lives strong, confident and with employable skills learnt through training and work experience.

Longridge is a centre of excellence for training 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 allowing them to achieve their full physical, intellectual and social potential as individuals, as responsible citizens and as members of their communities.

We are a passionate advocate of working in partnership and are delighted by the scale and number of other charities and children service's teams that we work with to identify those vulnerable young people that will most benefit from our training and work placement opportunities. With our partners we create powerful programmes that inspire confidence and self-respect in young people that may have made some poor choices or not have had the best start in life. We are always interested in hearing from other groups that would benefit from partnering with us or in helping to develop entrepreneurial ideas that will benefit young people. 

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 for the most vulnerable of our society.

We were 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. You can help by donating time to help create fundraising programme or by making a donation.  We urgently need to raise an additional £30,000 to put heating into our new training centre, which will enable us 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 to enable the centre to be able to sustain the operational costs of the charity.

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 CEO, Amanda Foister, amanda.foister@longridge.org.uk