By Mark Smith
Bradford City football club has endured success and failure over the past few years. They are currently enjoying a purple patch, including promotion from League Two and an EFL Cup final appearance.
Off the pitch, the Bradford City Community Foundation has enjoyed many successful years under the control of former Bantams player Ian Olmondroyd.
Running since 1988, the Bradford City Community Foundation has been a self-funded charity with aims to promote health and well-being in the local community through sport and exercise.
Olmondroyd has been the community manager and chief executive of the charity since 1999. His main goal was to grow the charity to become more successful in the local area. And growing the trust is exactly what Olmondroyd started to do and the stats today only amplify that. A summer involving 34 football camps which over 1500 children attended just shows how popular the trust is in the area.
And now, 27 years on, Olmondroyd is stressing that he’d like to spread football to everyone. Traditionally, charities have tended to stick to one thing, but Bradford’s foundation targets many different areas, such as kids in schools, disability sport and elderly people.
Olmondroyd went on to explain the successful summer for the trust, saying: “The camps are great and the numbers are quite high at the moment which helps us spread the word of football. We try to help people in all our sessions that we run.”
Coming up to 30 years of the Community Foundation, he said: “We just want to improve what we do – especially the disabled and women’s football clubs are big targets for us.”
He went on to add: “We want to try and make everything as inclusive as possible for the community.”