Community
Middlesbrough Football Club in the Community (MFCIC) was founded in 1995 by club chairman Steve Gibson and is the largest community-based football scheme in the United Kingdom. It is run separately from the football club but receives support from both the club in terms of providing players, staff, stadium facilities and PR in the matchday programme and other publications, as well as support from other local organisations.
Since 2002, the club and MFCIC have also run the Middlesbrough Enterprise Academy, a scheme which helps local children improve their entrepreneurial skills and increase their awareness of business planning and finance. In March 2008, plans were announced by the Premier League to roll out the scheme nationally amongst all Premier League clubs.
It was announced in December 2007 that Middlesbrough football club had carried out more community work during 2006–07 than any other Premier League club, rising from second place the previous year, with the club making 318 appearances – almost twice the Premier League average of 162. They were in the top two for community appearances again in 2007–08, with 374 – a 17% increase on the previous season.
Middlesbrough's mascot is Roary the Lion. The club runs Roary's Children's Charity Fund which purchases items for local children's charities.
In 2009, steel producer Corus Group announced the possibility that it would mothball its Teesside plant, with up to 4,000 employees and contractors facing redundancy, after a consortium of steel magnates walked away from a 10-year deal. Middlesbrough Football Club helped with the "Save Our Steel" campaign by hosting dozens of steel workers and their families as they marched around the ground, promoted the campaign via the stadium's PA system, scoreboards and in match day programmes, while players wore t-shirts during warm-ups promoting the campaign. Chairman Steve Gibson said:
"Middlesbrough Football Club exists for the community, for the people of Teesside—and the closure of the steel plants threatens to rip the heart out of our community. We cannot stand by and allow that to happen. We want the steelworkers and their families to know that we are behind them and will help their campaign in any way we can ... We like to think that the football club is the flagship of Teesside. Well this is our town and these are our people and we have to do what we can to help them."Read more about this topic: Middlesbrough F.C.
Famous quotes containing the word community:
“The most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate, so that being thrown into the balance it may prevent either scale from preponderating.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“Fortunately art is a community effort—a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“... to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.”
—Sharon Olds (b. 1942)