Bellevue FC: The inclusion-specific club winning awards for incredible community impact
In June 2024, Bellevue FC was the proud recipient of the Best Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Initiative at the WSA Sports Industry Awards last year.
Founded just under a decade before, the club had already firmly cemented itself as a true champion of equality, diversity and inclusion in Welsh sport and leisure.
Bellevue FC is Wales’ first and award-winning, league-registered, multi-ethnic and inclusion-specific football club, offering league football opportunities to those from perceived adverse backgrounds and social poverty that might normally face barriers or discrimination within the sport.
The club was originally established following the news that Wrexham County Borough Council were planning on decommissioning the football pitch at Bellevue Park. The inevitability of the negative impacts this would have on the foreign community in the area prompted Delwyn Derrick and his friends to take action.
“We started the club with a group of friends back in 2016,” he told the WSA. “We had been meeting up for a kick around about a couple of times a week at Bellevue Park in Wrexham. Quite often you’d meet other groups of people doing the same thing, so you end up having a kick around together.
“Before you know it, there are goal nets, games and friendships! It made sense to take the social aspect of the sport and formalise it into a format for access to social integration and community cohesion; so that is exactly what we did. Regardless of anyone’s background, football is a language that everyone can speak.”
The club has subsequently done nothing but grow thanks to its mission of inclusion.
Formed to provide opportunities to foreign nationals moving to the area, the club supports refugees, asylum seekers, economic and educational migrants, children and adults with learning difficulties, those with minor physical disabilities, those with mental health issues, people within the LGBTQ+ community and people within the BAME community.
Furthermore, the club has a female junior section that is going strong; Bellevue FC is looking to expand its offering for girls’ football and build a pathway to senior women’s football in the near future.
The club has inclusion at the heart of all it does, with its teams currently consisting of 17 different nationalities. To celebrate this wonderful diversity, the club has included flags on the back of their youth teams’ kits.
“The kids love it,” Delwyn said. “From the front, they all wear the same badge, but from the back is where they came from to get here; so, we have Welsh flags, of course, but also Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Nigeria, Poland, Philippines, South Africa, Kenya and many more. It looks incredible.”
Representing the culture at the club, the flags embody its mission to “accomplish barrier-free access to football for anyone who has felt underserved by the sport,” explained Delwyn.
“The club is the vehicle to achieve the change that all of our players want to see. We have created a community within the club where, because of everyone’s backgrounds, everyone stands on equal terms. The club couldn’t exist without the cooperation and collaboration of everyone who’s involved.”
And, given the positive change that Bellevue FC seeks to make, that collaboration extends far beyond the pitch – all the more impressive when taking into account that the club is volunteer-led.
Within the wider community, Bellevue FC can always be found standing side by side with organisations promoting equality and inclusion in society. Their volunteers can be found in situations ranging from motivational speaking to running pop-up stands at community events, such as the Offa Community Carnival and AVOW Volunteers Day as well as having spoken at Glyndwr University, Wrexham Enterprise Hub and as part of Holocaust Memorial Day, for example.
In its bid to create a vast support network with football as the unifying factor, the club has also collaborated with the likes of Kick it Out, Fans for Diversity, the Football Supporters Federation, Show Racism the Red Card, Football V Homophobia, Level Playing Field, the Wrexham Disabled Supporters Association, Wrexham Town of Sanctuary, Citizens of the World and Wrexham City of Culture.
Getting to know the players has also provided the club’s volunteers a firsthand insight into their needs as people outside of football. This has resulted in collaborations with organisations such as the locally based CLPW (Portuguese Community Group), British Red Cross, BAWSO and North Wales Police, as well as volunteers supporting with things like job and asylum applications.
“Working in isolation just isn’t an option in diverse communities,” elaborated Delwyn. “By their very definition these communities tend to be the minority in society, but that shouldn’t make them any less important.
“If you want to fill up a football club, you need to work with anyone and everyone to make sure that everyone knows who you are and what you do. Without these stakeholder relationships, a club like ours just wouldn’t be sustainable.”
Delwyn himself has also won a number of individual awards for his impactful work but has never taken full credit, donating trophies to the club’s cabinet, exemplifying the commitment and accentuating the hours of dedication put in by the club’s volunteers to make a difference.
Delwyn hopes the impact will be ever-lasting, with the club “always looking to grow and develop as a sustainable resource for the future.”
“We have junior teams now that are forging a player development pathway through to our senior team,” he confirmed, “and we are looking at our structure and infrastructure to see what we need to do as administrators to ensure that we are safeguarding the future of all our players.
“The club is packed to the roof with incredible people and I’m sure that with everyone working together this club will go on to keep achieving great things long into the future.
“More than anything, I would love to stick around long enough to see some of our kids go on to have great experiences in the sport and eventually turn their hand to coaching the next generation of Bellevue juniors.”
English