Brunswick Youth and Community Centre

Kevin Donoghue, Solicitor Director of Donoghue Solicitors, and Keith Lloyd, Centre Manager of Brunswick Youth and Community Centre.

Donoghue Solicitors is proud to adopt Brunswick Youth and Community Centre as it’s nominated charity.

Read all about this pioneering arrangement here.

About Brunswick Youth and Community Centre

Founded by ex- Prisoners of War in 1947 and based in Bootle, Merseyside, Brunswick Youth and Community Centre is a vital resource for people in Bootle, Sefton, and beyond.

“The Brunny”, as it is known locally, started as Brunswick Boys Club. Its charitable activities are:

to provide the youth of Bootle and Sefton area with educational and leisure facilities to help them grow to full maturity as members of society.

The centre also embraces the wider Sefton community by providing facilities for recreation and leisure time activity with a view to improving the conditions of life in the area.

To make sure that the charity helps as many people as possible, membership of Brunswick Youth and Community Centre is free and it provides many free (or subsidised) activities for people of all ages, from newborns to senior citizens. These include youth clubs, job clubs, a pensioner’s club, and gardening at the Centre and in the community. It also hosts footballer Jamie Carragher’s Sports and Learning Academy and 23 Soccer Schools, and Liverpool’s Tamil School, which serves the Sri Lankan community.

Kevin Donoghue’s Connection

Our Solicitor Director, Kevin Donoghue, personally benefited from the Centre and its programmes. He was a regular at The Brunny in his youth and later volunteered for it, leading young people on outward-bound activities.

At the Centre Kevin saw first-hand the good work its staff and volunteers do in the community, particularly among the financially disadvantaged. Many Bootle residents live in poverty and The Brunny provides them with a supportive, positive environment to improve their lives through education, health, and social cohesion.

Kevin is thrilled to offer his firm’s resources to help the Centre.

How We Help Brunswick Youth and Community Centre

To deliver its services and activities, Brunswick Youth and Community Centre relies on a mix of funds (from the public and private sectors, partners, sponsors, and the public) and volunteers (to support its trained staff).

This combination of money and time is essential to the Centre’s survival, particularly in a time of budget cuts, which Centre Manager, Keith Lloyd, estimated at £40,000 this year.

For a small charity, that is a lot of money to replace. But Kevin Donoghue recognised an opportunity for Donoghue Solicitors and its team to make a real difference. As he told the Bootle Champion:

It would have been easy to just write a cheque, but The Brunny needed more than that. It needed a way to plug the funding gap.

Adopting Brunswick Youth and Community Centre as our nominated charity means that we contribute through

• funds,
• volunteering our time, and
• using our skills and experience

where we can make the most impact.

This is how we help:

Website

We donated the development costs and volunteered our time to create and host the charity’s 50-page website www.brunswickycc.co.uk.

The Brunny did not have a website, which we considered essential for fundraising. It was easy to understand why. Professional websites are complicated and can be very expensive. Dealing with web designers and others involved requires technical skills and can be daunting for the inexperienced.

Working with The Brunny’s management team, we designed a website to:

• give the public information about activities at the Centre;
• tell them about the Centre’s unique history;
• encourage partners and sponsors to help; and
• give members of the public an easy way to contribute by volunteering, donations, and bequests.

We volunteered our time and used our experience, contacts, and skills to project-manage the website from start to finish. This included design and development, writing content, optimising the site for search engines etc..

In doing this our marketing team volunteered time at evenings and weekends as well as during working hours (with Kevin’s permission!).

Now the website is live we continue to help with its maintenance, training staff at the Centre on how to use it, and behind-the-scenes development work.

Keith Lloyd said,

“Everyone at Brunswick Youth and Community Centre is extremely grateful to Kevin and his team for their hard work. Their dedication to the project and commitment of time and money has been a godsend. I hope that people will use the website to find out more about what we do, and, if they can, help us through donations. We need all the help we can get.”

Marketing Support

We volunteer our time through ongoing marketing support. This includes promoting the charity’s online and offline presence to help the public, partners, and sponsors find out more and, if possible, help and support it.

Sponsorship

We sponsor Brunswick Youth and Community Centre through donations and other fund-raising efforts. For example, last year we donated money to The Brunny instead of sending Christmas cards.

Privilege

We are proud to be associated with Brunswick Youth and Community Centre. Being able to give back, improving people’s lives as solicitors and members of our community, is a great privilege.

We have made a long-term commitment to the Centre and will continue to support it in any way we can.

As Kevin Donoghue said, by adopting it as our nominated charity, we are “determined to make sure that people from Bootle continue to benefit from The Brunny.”

If you would like to help Brunswick Youth and Community Centre go to the charity’s website www.brunswickycc.co.uk and click on the Virgin Money Giving logo to donate.