Newcastle United Foundation Rises to The Premier League Inspires Challange
More than 1,750 young people from across England and Wales have joined forces to help tackle environmental sustainability at their football clubs and in their communities, as part of this year’s Premier League Inspires Challenge with Newcastle United Foundation being one of them.
The Challenge is one element of the Premier League Inspires programme, which clubs run on a weekly basis to support 11–25-year-olds who are at risk of not reaching their potential as they move through the education system and early adulthood.
The Premier League Inspires Challenge empowers participants to take on a social action project and make a difference in the world around them.
This season, young people were tasked with considering what environmental sustainability challenges football clubs might face. More than 500 young people joined the annual challenge with Newcastle United Foundation and pupils from Duke’s Secondary School developed a winning project to enhance and improve North East wildfire areas and nature reserves.
By using recycled materials from matchdays at St. James’ Park, the team created bird boxes and bug hotels to improve biodiversity. Newcastle United’s Sean Longstaff recently worked with the Duke’s students to paint bird boxes in the club’s iconic black and white stripes.
Since starting our delivery of the Premier League Inspires programme in 2019, we’ve supported 2,177 young people to develop existing and gain new personal skills through more than 4,000 sessions in 23 North East schools.
Our PLI Challenge Launch event was a great opportunity for our participants to not only learn and support the local environment and wildlife, but also the repurposing of waste materials.
The project also saw us place a bug hotel at Newcastle United’s Training Centre, with bird boxes added to the school’s nature area and a living wall at Newcastle University’s Helix Energy site.
Matty Tumilty, NU Futures Careers Coordinator at Newcastle United Foundation
Having come up with their environmental social action ideas, participants joined one of five regional celebration events taking place at football clubs across the country, where they shared details of their activity with teams of their peers representing 44 clubs from across the Premier League and the English Football League.
Newcastle United Foundation Premier League Inspires Challenge team also explored the positive work that Newcastle United and Equans are already doing to tackle climate change, including how the club are looking to improve their position in the PL Sustainability League and Equans’ work with Newcastle City Council to improve sustainability in the city.
The Premier League became a signatory of the UN Sports for Climate Action framework in 2021 and aims to reduce its own emissions by 50% before 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2040, in line with the 1.5 degrees global warming limit of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
