The Nottingham-based charity Support Through Sport has announced plans to expand across the Midlands.

The award-winning programme delivers football and boxing sessions and provides intensive mentoring delivered by former offenders to young people living in disadvantaged communities.

Chief Executive Tranai Todd, 20, launched the scheme in response to his own experiences after young people he knew while growing up were lured into criminal gangs, including selling drugs and carrying knives.

IMPACT

Over the last two years, Support Through Sport has been recognised at the National Crimebeat Awards and the Nottingham Housing Heroes Awards, and recently began delivering in Birmingham. The charity, which currently works with more than 3000 young people each year, is seeking new partners or supporters as its impact grows across the Midlands.

Tranai (pictured below) explained: “I grew up in a very deprived area and when I was around the age of 14, I noticed that people I knew were starting to get involved in knife crime, drug dealing and anti-social behaviour.

“Violence was glamorised on social media, through music videos made by people in my school or recordings of fights that happened there which were posted online.

“I found it hard to get away from all of this because this way of life was normalised and seeing so much violence impacted me even if I didn’t realise it at the time.

"I knew that I wanted to make a better life for myself, and I found that boxing was a distraction from all of this.

“It taught me to be resilient, gave me something to do and allowed me to safely vent my anger and frustrations into something I enjoyed.

SUPPORT

“My decision to start boxing meant I was then able to come away from secondary school with a good set of GCSEs unlike many of my peers and I know that without boxing I would have gone down the wrong path.”

In 2021, Tranai was named Young Leader of the Year at Nottinghamshire Police’s ‘Live Our Best Life Awards’.

He told nottinghamshire.police.uk: “Some of the young people we work with have been involved in robbery and aggravated assault or have been involved in selling drugs and ultimately have ended up being arrested and find themselves in custody.

“We provide wrap-around support to these individuals to look at their situation to try and understand what has led them to offend and give them the opportunity to move in a more positive direction.

“Some of our young people have engaged in our development pathway programme, where after they have volunteered 100 hours, they have been successful in securing a paid role as a sports coach."

Tranai is a community ambassador for the Violence Reduction Partnership which is a project to tackle serious violence across Nottinghamshire.

To read more, visit supportthroughsport.co.uk or find out how you can get involved.