LFC Team with Youth to Serve Merseyside Elderly

The club ethos for Liverpool Football Club is often said to be found in the club’s anthem: You’ll Never Walk Alone. A tune that serves to announce the communal spirit of the club and city, and also serves as a mantra. In fact, that sense of team spirit lives in one of Bill Shankly’s most famous quotes:

A football team is like a piano. You need eight men to carry it and 3 to play the damn thing.

In short, nothing achieved on the pitch is down to one person and Liverpool as a club have tried to ensure that philosophy carries on in the way it interacts with the community.

As such, they’ve established the Red Neighbours Program, which this space has covered a bit over this past season. The Red Neighbours Program is aimed at addressing food poverty, education, and supporting the elderly in Merseyside. This particular iteration of the program saw local youth from a primary school based in Anfield teamed up with elderly in the area to make rag rugs and cushions.

The program’s design first had the youth take what the club has called an “intergenerational class” where the youth were taught how to sew the rugs and cushions. Then, they were asked to teach those techniques to their elderly counterparts.

The effect of the program was aimed at stemming elderly social isolation, a phenomenon wherein elderly slowly move away from regular social interaction due to various effects such as increasing frailty, absence of loved ones, and economic hardship. The elderly are obviously increasingly vulnerable to these issues and so getting them to be able to interact regularly with others has been a big part of Red Neighbours’ push on supporting the elderly.

All told, we can be very proud of a club that works so hard to bring light and hope to the lives of all members of its community, but especially to the ones that may feel forgotten. In this way, we prove that they really never walk alone.