Glentoran Community Trust Cross Community Initiative
12th February 2007
The Glentoran Community Trust are exploring various ideas aimed at encouraging more cross-community interest and involvement in Glentoran Football Club.
Our target area is of course primarily that of East Belfast.
One such section of our community, St. Colmcille’s Parish in Ballyhackamore, comprises some 800 families – roughly 2600 people in total right on our doorstep. The Primary school, St. Joseph’s, has a roll of 160 pupils, around 40% of whom do not have English as their first language.
The Glentoran Community Trust Board have already established good relations with the School Principal, with a view to encouraging pupils to consider adopting Glentoran as their local club.
We now look forward to a meeting with the Board of Governors, to which we have also officially invited a representative from Glentoran Football Club.
We will of course continue to keep members up to date of any progress.
Update 12/02/07 – “The Club’s The Hub”
Glentoran Community Trust today revealed plans to produce and fund a ‘Multi-Lingual’ brochure, aimed at promoting the many positives and benefits of Glentoran Football Club to the wider multi-cultural community of East Belfast.
In a bid to broaden interest and indeed expand on the existing Glentoran ‘Community Initiative’ Scheme, the GCT are set to launch “The Club’s The Hub”, in the hope of reaching out to the many ethnic-minority groupings now resident in greater East Belfast – many of whom do not have a great command of the English language.
All of us at Glentoran FC are justifiably proud of our boast of being a cross-community club, yet by overlooking something so simple as putting our message across to the many minority groupings surrounding our club in a way that they can understand, we might as well be excluding them!
“The Club’s The Hub” aims to bring to ALL our community exactly what the GCT and Glentoran Football Club have to offer.
Once completed, the new Brochure launch will take place in the Parochial Hall of St Colmcille’s Parish Ballyhackamore, kindly facilitated by Headmaster of St Joseph’s Primary School Mr Joe Ryan, and Parish Priest Father Delargy.
Glentoran Community Trust are also delighted to report that we have now been awarded substantial funding for our “The Club’s The Hub” initiative through the Progressive Building Society’s Community Award Scheme.
The £500 grant will go a long way towards the initial design, translation, printing and distribution costs of the new brochure.
Helping promote the initiative down at the Oval today were Glentoran and Northern Ireland Striker Gary Hamilton, and new Polish midfielder Lukasz Adamczyk, pictured here with GCT members William Cameron of the Community Initiative, and Graeme Norris from Progressive Building Society.
The Board and Members of the Glentoran Community Trust would take this opportunity to record our sincere thanks to the Progressive Building Society for their valued support.
