The Variety Club Working With The Mayor of London
Make a Splash – The Variety Club working with the Mayor of London,
PlaySport London and MWB Business Exchange
The Variety Club Children’s Charity and their corporate partners MWB Business Exchange are working towards providing access to swimming in disadvantaged areas across the capital by teaming up with the Mayor of London and PlaySport London.
For 60 years The Variety Club Children’s Charity has been helping sick, disabled and disadvantaged children and young people. The Variety Club has an illustrious history stretching back to the golden age of British entertainment. The charity has raised over £200 million in the last 6 decades and improved the lives of more than a million children and young people.
In our 60-year history we have given:
- Freedom with over 3,300 Easy Riders wheelchairs
- Independence through 4,898 Sunshine coaches
- Hope to more than a million children by raising over £200 million
- Courage by donating more than £20 million to specialist children’s hospitals
Make a Splash sees the Mayor delivering on one of the commitments made in ‘A Sporting Future for London‘, his sports legacy plan for London. It helps to combat the problem of a lack of swimming pools in London and provides opportunities for participation in sport and physical activity to children and adults in deprived areas of London. To download a copy of ‘A Sporting Future for London’ go to www.london.gov.uk/mayor/publications/2009/04/sporting-future.jsp.
The Mayor’s PlaySport London programme is the overall brand being given to sports-related activity funded from the £15.5 million Olympic legacy funding from the London Development Agency. With match-funding the aim is to deliver an investment of over £30 million into grass roots sport by 2012. Of this £15.5m, £7.5m is to be invested in facilities, with the primary focus being on small, park, community or estate-based facilities. More details will be released in the coming months. Further details will be announced as projects come on stream. For more about PlaySport London go to: www.london.gov.uk/playsport
MWB Business Exchange is the UK’s leading provider of contemporary and flexible office space solutions and meeting rooms. Our business centres are unbranded with a full reception and centre team allowing our clients to focus purely on driving their business. We offer over 70 centres across the UK and are London’s largest provider of serviced offices. Our Meeting Venues offer professional business rooms for meetings, training sessions and conferences with the very latest audio-visual equipment onsite.
Through a range of staff fundraising, customer initiatives and stand alone events, MWB Business Exchange are aiming to raise £112k for the Make a Splash campaign and the work that The Variety Club Children’s Charity does across the UK.
Total Swimming
Pools 4 people was developed by Total Swimming, a business with a passion for innovation, learning and excellence, led by a team of Olympic swimmers ‘putting back’ into the sport. It was in pursuit of these values that the ‘Pools 4 People’ programme was born and then developed in collaboration with London Swimming.
Total Swimmings mission is to positively influence on 1,000,000 people through Aquatics in the run up to the Olympic Games in 2012. Their temporary pool programmes including ‘Pools for People’, ‘British Gas Pools 4 Schools’ and ‘Pools for Cities’ which all offer a unique tool in any organisations aquatic strategy.
Total Swimming is proud to have a unique partnership with London Swimming and the Amateur Swimming Association in the delivery of these innovative solutions.
London Swimming
Is the regional arm of the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA) and committed itself in ‘A Strategy to get London Swimming 2008-2012+’ itself endorsed by the Mayor and Sport England to bring mobile swimming pools to London.
Over 13% of London primary schools (approx 213 schools) do not engage in a swimming programme despite it being a compulsory part of the national curriculum because they are simply too far from the nearest pool. Mobile pools allow us to bring the pool closer to the schools and communities that need it most. The real legacy from these pools is not the number of people that learn to swim during the 3 months but how many people stay swimming once the pool has moved away. As part of this legacy local people are trained as swimming teachers to enable them to volunteer or gain employment and to become community champions for swimming.
For more information about the programme / how the pools are made and current and future locations visit