A premiership football club is setting up an online centre to bring more than 4,000 local people into contact with information technology. The project, led by Sunderland FC and based at its Stadium of Light, is particularly targeted at older unemployed men and disabled people and their carers.
The project hopes to encourage people to attend classes by offering tours of the stadium and opportunities to meet the club's football players who are enthusiastic about the initiative, according to Sunderland's community manager, Bob Oats.
Some 15,000 young people are already coming through the stadium's classrooms each year. A new opportunities fund (NOF) grant of £259,736 will enable Sunderland to launch an adult learning programme in conjunction with the University of Sunderland.
The NOF is this week awarding a total of more than £6m to 46 schemes across the UK designed to help people from "deprived and disadvantaged communities" to access information and communications technologies (ICT). The Stadium of Light is one of three projects in the north-east receiving a total of £1.1m.
A project based at the National Centre for Popular Music, in Sheffield, is receiving £180,000 to train 5,000 local people in computing, numeracy, and literacy and linking these to media and creative skills.
You're Worth IT is one of five schemes in London to receive funding. Led by Harrow council, the project is being awarded £485,130 to deliver training across north-west London in partnership with seven organisations.
Awards worth £1.7m are also going to 10 schemes in the north-west; and nine in the south-west are receiving a total of almost £1m. Rural isolated communities are targeted by a Cornish project which involves a roving van, complete with computer equipment and tutors, offering basic IT classes to far-flung fishing villages.
Schemes in Scotland receive £742,871; Wales £425,624 and Northern Ireland £313,658.
Since the launch of its ITC grants programme in spring 1999, the NOF has awarded more than £300m.
Stephen Dunmore, NOF chief executive, says: "Learning these [ICT] specific skills brings not only knowledge vital for living in the 21st century but also the can-do confidence needed by so many disadvantaged communities."
