Get the skills to make a difference to your community!

Blackburn Rovers Community Trust is playing host to an exciting new course designed to help Blackburn with Darwen residents make a difference to where they live.

Community Ambassadors is a free 12 week accredited programme that’s open to anyone over the age of 16 who wants the opportunity to develop their leadership skills and become more involved in local life through working with others on projects that improve their neighbourhoods.

The Community Trust is teaming up with key local partners, including the Care Network and the borough’s Families, Health & Wellbeing Consortium, to offer a rich and varied programme that includes understanding different cultures, confidence building activities, developing community networks and project management. Everyone who takes part in the programme will have the chance to research their ancestry through DNA testing.

Sessions will primarily be based at Ewood Park with some cultural visits taking place within the borough too.

A free open day to find out more about the Community Ambassador programme is taking place on Wednesday 31st July, with two drop-in sessions from midday to 2pm and 5pm to 7pm. Anyone is welcome to attend the sessions in the Blackburn Rovers Business Centre on the first floor of the Darwen End at Ewood Park.

Ilyas Patel, Community Inclusion Manager at Blackburn Rovers Community Trust, explained:

The Community Ambassador programme is new and exciting; we’re very confident that it will help those who take part to make a very positive contribution to local society.

We hope that the range of participants who get involved will represent the rich and varied mix of backgrounds that help to make up our local borough and we hope that the collective skills of everyone involved, coupled with their desire to make Blackburn with Darwen the best possible community it can be, will ensure that this project creates a fantastic legacy for the wider community.

We’re really looking forward to the open day and hope that we’ll get chance to meet and inspire as many people as possible to get involved.

We’re delighted to be delivering this opportunity alongside some quality partners and know that together we can create something that will make a noticeable difference to local lives.

The Community Ambassador programme is being delivered on behalf of Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council and funded through the borough’s social integration programme.

Our Community, Our Future is a three year programme which brings together a wide range of local partners who are working together to strengthen relationships between people from different backgrounds, to help the borough become a place where diversity is valued and where people’s faith and cultures are understood and respected.

Councillor Mohammed Khan, Leader of Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, said:

The Community Ambassadors programme gives local people a fantastic opportunity to gain new skills, make connections and receive support to get ideas for community projects off the ground.

It is an important part of our social integration programme to get people from the borough’s diverse communities working together to make Blackburn with Darwen an even better place to live, and it’s so pleasing that we’ve had plenty of interest in the Community Ambassadors programme from across the borough already. Next week’s drop-in sessions are for anyone who’s interested to find out more before committing to take part.

To find out more about Our Community, Our Future, visit the Council website or like the Our Community, Our Future Facebook page.