West Cumbria Canoe Club

Project Title: Engaging New Groups

Funding Received: £4413.84

Project Outline: Returning to play following Covid-19 restrictions has seen an increased number of people, specifically families and children and young people willing to engage with West Cumbria Canoe Club and have a go at canoeing and kayaking. Although, having only a very limited amount of youth/female buoyancy aids has meant that unless they come along with their own, they have been restricted in terms of engagement.

West Cumbria Canoe Club is fully aware of the social, physical and mental health benefits of canoeing. Subsequently, they are keen to proactively engage with local community groups to promote those benefits. As a cub they need to ensure that it is equipped to accommodate the participation of novice paddlers. As a result, this project has been created to support children and young people from more deprived backgrounds engage with the club. The club has been proactively seeking to work with youth clubs in the local area to target those who maybe wouldn’t ever consider canoeing and kayaking to come along and have a go. Initial links have been really positive and these conversations also developed really nicely to the other audiences that the different centres are working with in the form of older adults from both Men’s and Women’s groups which we would also like to accommodate on the water.

This fund has helped the club invest in a range of different buoyancy aids, paddles, helmets, seats, CAG’s and spray decks to enable engagement with audiences that they are currently not equipped to engage with. The Club’s current community engagement strategy has been to provide free Introduction to Canoeing and Kayaking sessions on the first Wednesday evening of each month. These sessions have proved popular with the local community but have not specifically been targeted at young people or those who would not consider canoeing as an option for them. The plan moving forward is to continue this approach and continue to look to engage new audiences beyond this programme as the kit will allow this to happen.