Cwm Wanderers ASD Academy is a specialist academy that has been set up for children with Autism. The aim of the Academy is to promote health and wellbeing for boys and girls aged between 5 and 17 through football, followed by a Youth Club that has been specifically set up to improve communication and socialising skills for these children.

Children receive football training by a trained Autism Aware coach in a small group setting where they can improve their football skills. Children from the main stream Cwm Wanders Club actively volunteer at the Academy to help up skill the children, interact with them and raise their own awareness of Autism, tackling the issue of loneliness for these children which can be a common problem.

Once a child is up-skilled, they have the opportunity to join the main stream teams whereby the mainstream coach will be trained to handle the child. The youth club is set up so that following the training, the children can enjoy a fun and engaging environment packed with activities to help develop their communication and socialising skills in a safe environment run by trained volunteers. The programme is hugely successful but we need your help!

We desperately need a 4G pitch. We are facing challenges with interrupted football training due to weather affecting pitch conditions. Children with Autism need routine and need to be able to play each week without interruption or it can cause meltdowns. Currently we are using an Astro Turf location during bad weather which enables the football training to go ahead on most weeks, but the Astro field is at a different location, meaning that parents have to sign their child into training, then back out, move their child to the clubhouse for youth club to sign them back in and then out again at the end of the night. As you can imagine this is very disruptive for the parents and affects their rest bite that they need to have whilst the Academy is on.

This time is precious for the parents and offers them an opportunity to rest and do things for themselves. It is also very disruptive for the children to have to change locations from football to youth club and often this causes meltdowns. We want to double the size of the academy this year and having our own 4G pitch will make sure that we can do this.

Please help us to ensure that the Academy can grow in numbers, sustain long term stability and provide that vital rest bite for parents by helping us give this Academy a pitch that they can play on each week.

We currently have around 20 children on the Autism spectrum attending football and youth club at Cwm Wanderers AFC on a weekly basis, we would really like to increase these numbers and have a waiting list, however, one of the issues we face is being able to train every week due to the Great British Weather, we are trying to raise money to replace the grass surface with floodlights and 4G pitch to allow the children a permanent place to train each week.

Autistic children need stability and repetition and so having a familiar regular slot will further develop their football skills in the hope that they will integrate with the main stream teams we currently have at Cwm Wanderers AFC