Established in 2007 by the Premier League, the Kicks programme offers free sports provisions to eight to 18-year-olds with Chelsea Foundation sessions running in Hammersmith and Fulham, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Wandsworth.

All the sessions are delivered by FA Level 2 qualified coaches, many of which have come through the Kicks programme and have been supported by the Foundation and the Premier League to gain their coaching qualifications.

Five years ago, a shy and reserved Jasmine attended her first Kicks session with our Foundation coaches but fast forward to now and she is a confident individual with dreams of becoming a coach.

‘I’ve been with the Premier League Kicks Programme for five years.’ said Jasmine. ‘At first, it was a football session where I used to play with people from my area and then as I grew older a lot more opportunities sprung from it.

‘Before I was involved with Kicks, I was quite shy, I thought everything came to a person and you didn’t really have to work for anything, put themselves out there or make themselves feel uncomfortable sometimes but now it’s definitely all changed.

‘One of the things the Kicks sessions have helped me with, I’m quite interested in coaching, so they’ve really opened up a network of people that I could speak to about that and I’m now doing my Level One FA Coaching badge.

‘I feel like they’ve definitely helped me get there and definitely been that support and encouragement that I needed to do it.’

As part of the Premier League Kicks Youth Summit, the Chelsea Foundation invited 12 young people from the programme, including Jasmine, to give their thoughts on how communities can be more inclusive.

Over three days, the participants designed a presentation to answer the question, ‘How can we make our communities more inclusive for young people?’.

Working alongside Speakers Trust, who specialise in supporting young people to develop interview and presentation skills, our Kicks participants delivered a presentation to a number of key partners who support the programme.

The topics they discussed were how they would like free access to pitches, how they would like improvements made to their local pitches and their hopes for more employability opportunities and access to qualifications.

Speaking after a successful presentation delivery, Jasmine added: ‘Today me and the girls have given a presentation on some of the things we would like to see within our community. We feel like we have a voice with people who we wouldn’t normally speak to in our day-to-day life.

‘If you’d have met me two years ago, I would have never done anything like this. I’ve gained much more maturity. I wanted to get involved with the Youth Summit session with the Speakers Trust because it makes me a lot more confident.

‘I feel like if I didn’t have the support from the Kicks Programme, it would be quite difficult. You can feel when someone really cares. When an organisation like this really puts in the time and effort to each person, you kind of know that there is going to be more out of it. They keep me quite focused and that helps me excel in my everyday life.’

Chelsea Foundation senior social inclusion officer Callum Salhotra added: ‘The Premier League Kicks Programme is really important. It gets young people away from gang violence, knife crime, anti-social behaviour and into our sessions Monday to Friday every evening rather than hanging around on the streets.

‘The Premier League Youth Summit is getting peoples voices heard. Speakers Trust have come in to work without our young people on how to develop their presentation skills, how to be in an interview or how to present their ideas across.

'You can see that she [Jasmine] is a really confident, a comfortable speaker in front of big groups but prior to that when she first came to Kicks, she was shy and reserved.

'When she comes down to one of our Kicks sessions, she’s one of the leaders there, encouraging other young females to take part.’

For more information on how you can get involved in our Premier League Kicks sessions, click here.