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31 October 2024

RCA Racing Together Community Award 2024: Focus on the finalists

With just seven days until the RCA Showcase Awards take place in Edinburgh, we continue to highlight the five Community Award category finalists and why their initiatives were selected by the panel of judges.

Today the focus shifts to Sandown Park Racecourse for our penultimate project…

Community and Christmas

In June 2024, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) published a report that indicated that the Southeast of England has experienced a 52% increase in child poverty within working households since 2010. Building on their established partnership with the Lower Green Community Centre, Sandown Park Racecourse felt it was their responsibility to provide extra support, not only to Lower Green, but also to other local families through working with Spurgeons – a national charity that has dedicated family centres in the county of Elmbridge where the racecourse is based.

As part of the campaign, the racecourse had three main aims – to grow their Christmas regifting scheme by 10%, to integrate the racing industry and the racecourse into the local community with a positive impact, and to provide the opportunity for low-income families to go racing for free.

Horses for Courses

Sandown’s ‘Give The Gift Of Giving’ campaign has been an integral part of the Betfair Tingle Creek Festival for the last few years and they wanted to build on this for 2023. They created an enhanced marketing campaign, including dedicated posts on all social media channels, targeted emails, and both racecard and big screen advertisements to highlight the initiative. Local media outlets also pushed the message out, encouraging racegoers to bring donations to the fixture.

In August, the racecourse arranged for their Retraining of Racehorses (RoR) Horses for Courses ambassador Step Back and Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Coneygree to visit the Lower Green Community Centre and meet members of the community – a first chance for many of the visitors to meet a racehorse and learn about their lives both on and off the track. In addition to the visit, Sandown also offered free Family Festival Raceday tickets to all that attended, alongside a free lunch for 200 local people and goody bags for all the children.

Facts and figures

  • 422 gift items received from racegoers – a 40% increase on 2022 and over 100 families supported
  • Two horses spent two hours meeting over 40 members of the local community, with coverage from ITV Racing and the local radio
  • 200 local people invited to  a free Family Festival Raceday lunch and a chance to watch the racing from the Gold Cup suite.

Lower Green Community Projects Manager, Jenny French said “The Tingle Creek gifting programme has been a resounding success enabling us to distribute gifts to families and individuals in Lower Green who are struggling with the high cost of living. We are very grateful to everyone for their generosity. It is much appreciated and will make a huge difference at this expensive time of year.”

On being shortlisted, Sarah Drabwell, General Manager said “Sandown Park is delighted to be nominated for an RCA Community Award. Whilst we are located in the affluent town of Esher, there are pockets of our local community where families are in desperate need of support. We feel it is our responsibility to help provide this support through our work with the Lower Green Community Centre and the national charity Spurgeons, who also have dedicated Family Centres in our local community. 

Throughout the year we provide a series of different initiatives to engage and support local families; our Christmas re-gifting scheme has grown year on year, we’ve visited members of the community of all ages with our ROR ambassador Step Back and Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Coneygree, and have provided free tickets for parents and children, along with inviting 200 people for a free lunch on our Family Raceday, understanding it can be hard for lower income families to provide wholesome food during the school holidays. 

Looking to the future, we want to increase the number of opportunities for low-income families to come to our racedays, and build up our work with local businesses to involve them at all levels. We grew our “Give the Gift of Giving” Christmas campaign by 25% in 2023, with aims to continue to grow and develop this in 2024, working with Spurgeons to understand how we can have the biggest impact on families that need support. For anyone wanting to get involved, please head to our website.”

Will Sandown Park’s festive offer see them win the Community Award next week? Keep following to find out and look out for the final instalment tomorrow.

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