Celebrating women and girls across our organisation

On International Women’s Day #IWD, we’re celebrating women and girls across our organisation, from our inspirational founder and President, Dame Kelly Holmes, to our female athlete mentors, the incredible sporting champions who give our young people fantastic role models.  From the young women we stand shoulder to shoulder with on our programmes, to our brilliant team making it all happen.

Young people today are facing a ‘perfect storm’ – crisis after crisis. Recent reports show more than half of young people believe the cost of living crisis will have a worse impact on their life than the pandemic, with young women in particular feeling more anxious and worried about the future.  Our programmes are helping to combat this with confidence, resilience and self-esteem increasing most amongst female participants. Read on to hear more about their experiences:

Sally attended our On Track to Achieve programme

“I was chosen for the On Track to Achieve programme because I used to lack confidence speaking in new situations, with large groups, or to people I didn't know.  I would stand on the edge of groups and try to avoid eye contact.

After working with Jenna, I would definitely say my communication skills have improved and I’m now able to deliver a presentation to a group. Also, being able to talk to people I don’t know is so much better, which is about confidence and communication as well.

Jenna’s a really inspiring person, her story was interesting, and she’s given us great ideas. It was good to have an ex-athlete working with us because she has so much experience and she could really help us when we had questions.

Overall, this programme and working with Jenna has made me more confident in myself and my ideas, given me an increased sense of self belief and I’ve made new friends.”

Jenna Downing is a ten time British champion inline skater who now works for the Trust as an athlete mentor, supporting young people like Sally to gain confidence, develop new skills and improve their physical and mental wellbeing.

Jenna has been an inspiration to many young people at the Trust over many years, as she’s delivered on many programmes in both schools and in the community in the north of England. As a child, Jenna had to show great resilience to even become a skater, because for a long time, she wasn’t allowed to use the local skate park close to where she lived, purely because she was a girl. She turned up week after week and that resilience and determination is partly why she’s such an incredible role model today, one of the 19 female athlete mentors we have working with us today, making up more than half of the team.  Back in 2018 Jenna worked at Redwood School with Minnie and Dylan.

Ella started work at the Trust in 2022 as a Programme Coordinator, focussing on our AQA Unlocking Potential programme run in partnership with the education charity AQA. Ella’s role is vital as pulling together successful programmes can often be complex and Ella ensures that on programme such as the one Sally attended, everyone knows what the objectives and goals of the programmes are and is the central point of contact for the athlete mentor and the school to ensure a smooth delivery.

Coming from an education background, Ella really understands what support schools need to ensure our sporting champions can have the biggest impact possible on the students they work with.  

Joy Aboim has been a Trustee with Dame Kelly Holmes Trust since early 2020.  

Joy is a senior technical professional with a broad and diverse technical consultancy background who currently works for Cisco, a worldwide technology company. Alongside the rest of the Board, Joy provides valuable support, advice and guidance to the Trust, ensuring that we are always striving to improve and provide the best service possible to the young people we aim to support.

Joy has been instrumental in the Trust looking at new ways of using digital technology to reach more young people and streamline our resources to help us achieve our ambition of supporting 10,000 young people over the next ten years.

Of course, none of this would be possible if it wasn’t for the vision of our President and Founder Dame Kelly Holmes who set up the Trust in 2008. We believe athletes are inspirational role models and Kelly knows this from her own personal experiences. She wanted to create a legacy from her athletics career that would benefit young people, believing every child needs a hero – someone to look up to and be inspired by – her sports teacher was that person for her. When she founded the charity, it was the unstoppable positive attitude that she saw throughout sport that she wanted to share.

Delivering her vision, we provide specialist training to enable these sportspeople to harness their unique skillset and pass it on to others, working directly with young people and also with our corporate partners. It’s a winning combination which gets incredible results.