My initiative is designed for and delivered in London
Yes
I am 18 years of age or above, by the application deadline.
Yes
My organisation is a registered UK entity and has a London-based address.
Yes
My organisation is a non-profit (e.g. school, university, or local authority) — not a for-profit, which can only join as a partner.
Yes
If there is a for-profit organisation as a partner in my initiative, they work on a cost-recovery basis only.
Yes
My solution is implemented at scale, or if not, I have a clear business plan, a minimum viable solution (prototype, pilot, or proof of concept), evidence of access to a lease for the space you are leveraging, and evidence of work or impact in London within your coalition.
Yes
I am aware that, if I am submitting more than one application to a Challenge run by Ashoka and Go! London, only one of them is able to progress through the stages.
Yes
Are you an employee (and their children and grandchildren) of Ashoka or any of its respective affiliates and participating advertising and promotion agencies?
No
I have read and accepted the Challenge Terms & Conditions.
Yes
First Name
Ed
Last Name
King
Pronouns
He/Him
Email address
I would like to receive notifications and updates about Go London!, Ashoka, Ashoka Changemakers, and other Ashoka opportunities.
1
Are you an Ashoka Fellow?
No
Are you applying from an organization founded by an Ashoka Fellow?
No
If you are applying from an organization founded by an Ashoka Fellow, please specify the name and organisation of the fellow below.
Lead Organisation Name
Bloomsbury Football Foundation
Year that you started/ registered your organisation
2018
Initiative Title
Reimagining the Football Pitch as a Space for All
My initiative is designed for and delivered in London
1
Website URL(s) or Social Media Handles
https://bloomsburyfootball.com/
Initiative Stage
Scaling (You’re expanding impact to many new places or in many new ways)
Sectors/Themes: What topic does your project most directly relate to?
Children & Youth
Initiative Summary: Describe your initiative in one sentence
Bloomsbury Football Foundation’s initiative unlocks access to physical activity for London’s most disadvantaged young people by transforming football pitches into safe, affordable spaces where everyone - regardless of background, gender, or ability - can play, build connections, and belong.
The Problem: What problem are you helping to solve and who will benefit the most from your solution? How close are you to the problem and/or community impacted?
Across London, high-quality football pitches sit behind prohibitive hire fees, often shutting out the young people who need them most. In London’s most economically deprived communities, those ranking in the top 5% nationally on the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI), structural inequalities create access barriers - preventing the capital’s most disadvantaged young people from accessing physical activity, safe spaces, and a sense of belonging. This exclusion has consequences, with children from those most deprived communities twice as likely to be obese and almost four times more likely to develop mental health problems, when compared to those from the least deprived communities (Everything to Play For, 2025; London and London Boroughs, 2023). For girls, there are additional barriers. 68% quit sport at puberty due to fear of being judged (Women in Sport, 2022). 49% of teenage girls feel that there are not enough opportunities to play sport designed for girls (Women in Sport, 2022). These additional barriers further reduce girls’ access to spaces where they can play, resulting in girls missing out on 1.4 hours of sport per week when compared with their male peers (The Guardian, 2025). Bloomsbury Football Foundation works directly within these communities, delivering year-round programmes on local pitches and engaging 6,500 young people every week. We see firsthand how cost and culture prevent equitable access. Through this initiative, we will continue to reimagine more than 60 pitches as affordable, inclusive community spaces, dismantling the socioeconomic and gender barriers that limit young people’s wellbeing, and ensuring that those most at risk from structural inequalities can access the health, wellbeing, and community benefits of sport.
Your approach: How are you/ will you addressing the problem outlined above? How does your solution unlock or reimagine access to spaces for sport and physical activity? What role do landowners, local authorities, or other decision-making stakeholders play in your approach? We'd love to know about the origin of your idea, and what was your "aha" moment" that led you to take action?
Bloomsbury Football Foundation addresses youth inactivity by unlocking spaces through partnerships and removing financial barriers. We partner with schools and local authorities to access 60+ pitches across London’s most deprived LSOAs, then subsidise provision through our Financial Assistance model so sessions are free-to-play for those who need it. This approach - securing spaces and removing cost barriers - transforms underutilised pitches into safe and accessible community spaces. The ‘aha’ moment came when our founder, Charlie Hyman, ran his first session for four children - two who paid, and two who didn’t. He saw that getting children active was a matter of access, cost, and culture. Our model addresses these: Access: school partnerships unlock quality facilities beyond school hours. After school sessions and holiday camps open previously closed pitches, giving young people access to the spaces they need to thrive. Cost: our Financial Assistance Model removes the financial barrier to sport that prices out many families in low-income areas. We provide up to 100% bursaries, allowing young people from these communities access to spaces they were previously excluded from. Culture: We’re transforming who the football pitch is for. Our girls-only and disability-inclusive sessions, designed by coaches who incorporate Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) principles into their programming, ensure that the pitch is welcoming for all. Collaboration with young people, their schools and local stakeholders is key to this approach. Community-led groups, such as our Youth Board, and beneficiary surveys provide insights into our programmes, whilst schools provide facilities and help us to reach families. Together, we’re reimagining spaces by redesigning who can use them.
Collaboration with young people and the community: In what ways does your initiative engage young people and community members closest to the problem? What role do they play in building the solution you deliver?
Bloomsbury Football Foundation believes that young people closest to the problem must shape the solution. Our approach to reimagining spaces centres on collaboration with the local community. Our Youth Board - a team of eight youth ambassadors aged 12-16 from across our programmes - meet monthly to shape organisational priorities and help redesign provision. Their feedback directly led to the provision of sports bras and sanitary products for young women to ensure issues of dignity and comfort do not prevent anyone from playing. They also inform programming decisions on timings, location, and safety. We embed lived experiences throughout our programmes through our recruiting of local coaches: with a vision of local coaches, on local pitches, leading local young people. Coaches like Abdullah, who now works in the community he grew up in, provide relatable role models and access to a trusted adult - strengthening participation and community confidence. Our hyperlocal model, focused on establishing community hubs of 2km radius, means that all our young people are within walking distance of a training session. This ensures that transport barriers are removed and that sessions are genuinely local and community focused. We also collaborate with grassroots partners who hold expertise within specific communities. Partnerships with DilDil, who provide for Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees in North London, and the Royal Society for Blind Children, who help deliver one of our Blind and Partially-Sighted sessions, enable us to adapt spaces and provision to be as relevant and accessible as possible.
Potential for/Evidence of Impact: How do you imagine your initiative will make a difference in unlocking spaces for and access to physical activity and sport so far? If you have already implemented it, what difference have you made so far? What is the impact your initiative has had , and or what impact do you envision having in the future?
Since 2018, Bloomsbury Football Foundation has consistently demonstrated that unlocking access to pitches leads to lasting impact. Our evidence shows that removing barriers of access, cost, and culture leads to improved wellbeing outcomes. Through biannual longitudinal surveys, informed by our Theory of Change and aligned with the Stirling Children’s Wellbeing Scale, we have found that: • 88.5% of girls and 85% of boys that play with us meet recommended daily activity levels (compared to 38.8% of low-income girls nationally) • 94% report improved confidence (including 91% of girls) • 85% report improved mental wellbeing • 87.4% report improved emotional understanding and regulation • 92.8% have made friends from different ethnic or socioeconomic backgrounds “These sessions helped my daughter Aaliyah find her team, her voice, and herself.” - Parent of Aaliyah, 14 “Playing with Bloomsbury Football has built up my confidence. Now, if a boy says to me, ‘You can’t,’ I say, ‘Yes, I can.’” Niyah, 12 By 2027, we aim to expand access for 8,000 young people by increasing the number of pitches that we unlock. As we scale, we will maintain and strengthen our impact through robust quality assurance, so that more young people can access safe, well-run and appropriate spaces to play football. Reimagining the pitch does more than immediately increase activity levels, with recent studies suggesting that girls in the UK who participate in after-school sports are 50% more likely to secure ‘top-jobs’ later in life and stand to gain £30,000 in individual lifetime economic benefit (The Guardian, 2025). By embedding equitable access to spaces now, we are creating sustained socioeconomic benefits for communities facing systemic inequalities.
Innovation: What is different about your initiative compared to other solutions that are already out there? How is your approach original and innovative?
Bloomsbury Football Foundation’s innovation lies not in football provision, but in redesigning who football spaces are for and how they are accessed. Traditionally, high quality school pitches in London are locked after hours or hired at commercial rates which exclude those from low-income families. Our model challenges these norms. First, we unlock underused school facilities across the capital through long-term partnerships with schools that prioritise youth access. Rather than creating new infrastructure, we reimagine existing spaces for the benefit of the community. Second, we have developed a financial assistance model that removes cost as a barrier. Every child pays what they can, and those who can’t pay, don’t pay. Blending earned and philanthropic income avoids creating a tiered system: ensuring young people from different backgrounds play on the same team and foster cross-background friendships. Third, we have pioneered a coaches-as-trusted-adults approach, whereby our football coaches are not only delivering sport sessions but are also teaching social-emotional learning principles (informed by the CASEL wheel framework). This integrates confidence, emotional regulation, and sense of belonging directly into an on-pitch environment. Finally, we challenge the status quo by unlocking the pitch through girls-only, disability-inclusive, and refugee-focused sessions - demonstrating our central insight that the football pitch is a place for all. Together, these innovative elements create a structural change: rewriting the narrative on who gets access to quality sports facilities, and who belongs on the pitch. “The focus is on mental health and happiness - the coaches care about how we're developing in our lives, not just our football.” - Carla, 16
Viability and Scalability: How are you setting your initiative up for success, and what is your plan to ensure operational sustainability of your solution and its impact? What are your ideas for scaling your initiative to the next level?
Bloomsbury Football Foundation has a proven track record of scaling sustainably, growing from four participants in our first session in 2018 to over 6,500 weekly participants today. This replicable model will be scaled further to match our next goal: 8,000 young people by 2027 (equitably divided between boys and girls). This ambition is data-driven and strategic: prioritising expansion into LSOA’s which rank in the bottom 10% nationally on the IDACI, ensuring new provision reaches areas of highest need. Each new Bloomsbury Community follows an established blueprint. We seek long term partnerships with schools in low-income areas, establish schools’ provision to build trust and engagement, and then activate out-of-school access to facilities through our extra-curricular programmes. This phased model ensures sustainability, a strong participant pipeline, and a community focus. Operational stability relies on various factors: A diversified funding model - which ensure we do not become over-dependent on one stream. We use a range of major donor cultivation, trust and foundation grants, corporate partnerships and participant contributions. Quality assurance - robust safeguarding processes, coach training, and impact measurement ensure cross-organisation consistency. Mutual-value partnerships – our partner schools benefit from access to expert coaches and community engagement, making agreements attractive. We also believe that the recent announcements of both Gabby Logan and Molly Bartrip as ‘Bloomsbury Ambassadors’ will provide momentum and visibility, facilitating growth. Through structured growth, diversified funding, and national visibility, we are scaling our sustainable model to increase equitable access to the pitch.
Roles and Responsibilities: Describe how responsibilities are shared among your team or partners.
Bloomsbury Football Foundation will be the primary and sole organisation in the project.
Upcoming Milestones: Please provide an overview of the milestones that are required for your initiative to come to fruition/to grow.
We are now operating 7 ecosystems, reaching 6,500 young people per week and have the core infrastructure in place to support further scale. Our next phase focuses on accelerated ecosystem growth, financial sustainability, and system strengthening to reach 20,000 young people per week by 2027–28. 2025–26: Expansion to 10 Ecosystems • Increase weekly reach to 8,000 young people • Launch 3 new place-based ecosystems in areas of high deprivation • Recruit and train local delivery teams • Secure multi-year anchor funding in each new geography • Continually strengthen quality assurance and central operational systems Milestone: Demonstrate that new ecosystems become operationally stable and financially viable within 24–36 months. 2026–27: Regional Scaling • Expand to 14 ecosystems • Reach 15,500 young people per week • Strengthen central infrastructure (32 non-coach staff) across finance, data, safeguarding, and people systems • Reach a sufficient saturation point across London that we are well-positioned to enter new cities. Milestone: Successfully manage multi-city delivery while maintaining programme quality and safeguarding standards. 2027–28: Full Integration • Operate 19 ecosystems • Reach 20,000 young people weekly • Achieve £11.9m turnover • Consolidate funding mix (multi-year philanthropic, institutional and earned income) • Embed longitudinal evaluation and continuous improvement systems Milestone: Establish a financially robust, nationally-scalable model delivering sustained, high-quality impact at scale. Across all phases, growth is contingent on securing multi-year transformational funding, maintaining delivery quality as participation increases, and ensuring each ecosystem achieves local financial and operational sustainability within three years.
Capacity-Building Participation and Support Funding: If you were to make it as a finalist, you will be required to participate in an 8-week capacity building programme. If funding/ cost is a barrier to your participation, we may be able to offer up to 10,000 GBP of grant money available to support you. Please break down below, if it is the case, what costs you would incur and you would need covered. (Please note that there are restrictions on how the grant money may be used; please refer to the T&Cs for further details.
Were we to claim these additional funds they would most likely be used to fund a consultant who would support us in our future modelling as we look to expand provision of our services across London.
