A JUNIOR rugby club has been awarded charity funding to buy training balls and electric pumps to inflate them.
Blaenavon Mini and Junior Rugby Club will also use the £945 it has been awarded from a fund to hire halls in two different locations to run training sessions over the winter and stated its activities will engage youngsters in team sports and improve social skills, health and wellbeing.
The club is one of seven activity clubs and churches sharing in £6,180 distributed by Torfaen Borough Council from the Welsh Church Act Fund.
The others to benefit are Allsortz Netball Club, Hill City Church, Torfaen Qigong Club, Hope Centre Ministries and the churches of St Peter and St Paul in Blaenavon.
Abersychan-based Allsortz was awarded £900.70 to purchase netballs, ball carriers, kit and first aid items and to cover hall hire to increase its capactity and reduce its waiting lists for community sessions.
Torfaen Qigong Club said its breathing and meditation sessions, in Panteg, will improve and increase wellbeing and its £585 award also covers hall hire costs.
Hill City Church, in Pontnewynydd, will use a £1,000 grant to buy art equipment and resources for classes intended to reduce isolation and loneliness while Hope Centre Ministries, in Pontypool, has £750 to spend on improving outcomes for “addicts” and work to reduce relapses. It will also purchase five “good quality single mattresses” for a residential facility.
St Peter’s Church and St Paul’s Church, both in Blaenavon, were each awarded £1,000 under the fund’s objective of the “advancement of religion”.
St Peter’s will work with pupils at Blaenavon School to maintain a graveyard and purchase instruments for a worship band while St Paul’s want to improve “links with young people” and will use its funds to maintain its building, create regular flower displays and purchase robes to establish a junior altar as well as equipment for hospitality.
Labour-controlled Torfaen council agreed in 2015 it should prioritise the “relief of hardship and the administration”, of the five key objectives, when considering applications under the fund. It recommitted to that decision, in 2017, following complaints churches and chapels were missing out on funding for repairs and maintaining buildings.
Examination, in November last year, found an “under-utilisation” of the fund during the first two quarters of the financial year and it was agreed to open the scheme to consider applications under its wider criteria that as well as advancement of religion includes “other community benefits”, the “advancement of education” and “promotion of Welsh arts and literature.”
The Welsh Church Act Fund was set up with proceeds and assets following disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales in 1920 and is distributed by local authorities.