John Lockes Ladies Football Club in Callan are the chosen Kilkenny club taking part in the Lidl One Good Club initiative, in association with the LGFA and Jigsaw. The programme offers selected clubs throughout the country the opportunity to support club members to engage in activities that can promote better mental health and well-being. In addition, the initiative is designed to provide the wider community with opportunities to engage with positive messages promoting better mental health and enabling them to continue to support young people in the community.
Club PRO and One Good Club team leader Aisling Bryan explains why the club got involved, ‘We decided to apply as we feel it is so important to let our young players know that their mental health is a crucial aspect of their lives as members of our club. We want them to feel safe and show them that talking about how they are feeling and doing things as a club to promote a positive mental health are important to us to ensure they develop not only as a player but also a person.’
The programme encourages and supports clubs to undertake a series of mental health and wellbeing activities. The five-step programme was developed using the ‘5 a Day for your Mental Health’ concept, an evidence-informed framework, made up of simple actions aimed at boosting mental health and wellbeing. The steps include ‘Connect’, ‘Be Active’, ‘Take Notice’, ‘Give’ and ‘Keep Learning’. Each step provides participating clubs with a suite of suggested activities, simple enough to complete without a significant time or resource commitment. Activities include connecting with the community by hosting a coffee morning, organising fun ‘get active’ sessions aimed at younger members of the community not involved in sport or introducing meditation and mindfulness as part of the ‘cool down’ after training.
Some of the wonderful activities undertaken so far by John Lockes Ladies Gaelic Football Club include their club players connecting with local nursing homes through messages and pictures, the whole club connecting virtually with a fun pass it on challenge, a whole community ‘From Malin to Mizen Head’ active challenge and a ‘Spring Awakening’ themed photography competition encouraging members of the club and community to take notice of their beautiful locality.
Aisling reports how well the initiative is going down locally, ‘We at the John Lockes LGFA are delighted to have been chosen to take part in the LIDL One Good Club initiative in partnership with Jigsaw. So far we have had a very positive response from the community to our different events and we hope to continue running events like these after the initiative has ended and we are back training together once more.’ The club’s Facebook page is well worth a look and is bursting with the positivity brought about by this great programme. We look forward to seeing what the club and community strive to do next to promote better mental health and we wish them luck in all future endeavours as they complete the 10 week programme towards securing official Lidl One Good Club accreditation for their club.
For more information on the initiative visit the Lidl One Good Club section of the Ladies Gaelic Football website here.
