Premier League Inspires challenge highlights mental health awareness
St Joseph’s Catholic School represented Swansea City AFC Foundation at Wembley Stadium for the Premier League Inspires challenge, which focused on raising awareness of mental health and wellbeing within their community.
This year’s topic coincided with the Premier League’s ‘Inside Matters’ campaign, which aims to provide advice on how to understand and manage feelings of anxiety.
Having been tasked with creating a social action project that makes a difference to their own local community, students from St Joseph’s developed the idea of a health and wellbeing (HWB) garden for their school.
The HWB garden has been designed to be a safe space for pupils where they can enjoy an area to relax, a gardening club to learn new skills and also a memorial space to remember those who they’ve lost.
The participants, who were supported by Swans Foundation’s PL Inspires coordinator Matthew Jenkins, shared their project ideas with their peers from across other Premier League and EFL clubs at the Wembley stadium day celebration event.
“Mental health is such an important topic, especially for young people in secondary school, so we’re really proud of how the group has engaged with the task and created a project which is so in touch with everything we’ve talked about across the Inspires programme,” said Jenkins.
“They’ve had to research different theories to build their project around and that has really helped them to increase their understanding of how they can help not only their own mental wellbeing, but that of their peers too.
“To be able to go to a venue like Wembley to continue to develop the HWB garden and to share ideas with other students from across the country means that the group now have a really rounded view of how they can manage their mental health.
“The whole experience of the trip to Wembley was brilliant, to get to see behind the scenes on a stadium tour I think was definitely a highlight for the group and a nice reward for all the hard work they’ve put in throughout the Inspires programme.”