(Source: OneFamily Foundation)

OneFamily Foundation £25k award means West Fife Fencing Club can build a facility for everyone to enjoy 

A fencing club founded in a school dining room has at last found a permanent home thanks to a £25,000 community award from the OneFamily Foundation.

The West Fife Fencing Club (WFFC) has achieved great success, despite being based for many years in a school dining hall and having no dedicated facilities. However, the club has recently managed to purchase an old primary school from Fife Council, which will act as its new permanent base.  

The £25,000 OneFamily Foundation award will now be used to convert the premises and make it a usable facility, not just for the club members, but for the whole community.

OneFamily customer Frances Lalos, whose 15 year old son Andreas is a promising young fencer at the club, said: “It is absolutely fantastic that we won – I still can’t believe it.  The coaches work so hard, giving up so much of their own time to help the kids.

“It was hard when we didn’t have our own space as they spent a lot of time travelling to and from different schools and community halls to practice, so our new home will make such a difference to us all. We really want to thank OneFamily for the money and for everyone in the community for really getting behind us.”                

The club currently has 75 members but the coaches also work with local primary schools to encourage children to get involved in fencing, and now that the club has its new home it is anticipated membership will grow.

Ken Rose, a trustee and founder of WFFC, said: “With our new, permanent home, we can make fencing more widely available to many more people, and it can be used by our national body, Scottish Fencing, too which can only be a good thing for our national competition hopes.”

Frances added: “Everyone in our community will benefit; they can use the hall for socials such as children’s parties, sporting occasions, fitness classes and all manner of events, so it’s going to help hundreds and hundreds of people.”

The OneFamily Foundation is a unique customer benefit fund, provided by mutual, OneFamily, which has committed to make £5million available to its members over the next five years to make their lives and communities better.

James Hale, Customer Engagement Manager at OneFamily said: “We are delighted to award £25,000 to the West Fife Fencing Club. The funding will not only benefit the Club’s members but also the wider community who will have a great new social facility for their use. This kind of project is exactly what the OneFamily Foundation was set up to do, and the WFFC is most deserving of its award.”

OneFamily is a mutual organisation providing investments, savings, health and life insurance products to help families work together to meet the financial demands of modern life.  As a customer-owned business it is run for the benefit of its customers.  The OneFamily Foundation redistributes a portion of the organisation’s profits, and intends to make £5 million available to customers over the next five years to help them, their families and their local communities. The Foundation has also helped hundreds of customers with personal grants since its launch in 2014, and its funding pot is made possible due to the financial stability of the customer-owned organisation.

There are four categories for each award, in order to ensure the Foundation gives a wider range of community projects an equal chance to access the funds. For this round of Community Awards there is one award of £25,000 and four awards of £5,000 available in each category.  West Fife Fencing Club won the largest award available in the Sports and Social Groups category.

For further information about the OneFamily Foundation please go to https://foundation.onefamily.com/