Millwall Community Trust CEO Sean Daly has featured in the Southwark News after Dame Marcella visited Millwall Football Club last Saturday.
You can read the full story below:
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MILLWALL’S 2-1 win against Portsmouth last Saturday, April 5, was a particularly unique occasion for two reasons.
Firstly, Mihailo Ivanovic became the first Lions player to score more than one goal in a game versus Pompey in 114 meetings in all competitions when he headed home the winner in the 87th minute, and secondly Millwall hosted the Governor-General of Saint Kitts and Nevis, Dame Marcella Liburd.
Dame Marcella paid an official visit to the United Kingdom to attend the investiture ceremony hosted by King Charles III on April
Four days later, she visited The Den, where she spent time at the Millwall Community Trust, before watching the Lions triumph over Pompey in a closely-fought encounter.
Millwall Community Trust CEO Sean Daly spoke to NewsAtDen about Dame Marcella’s visit.
“At the beginning of March the club received a letter from the government house over at Saint Kitts and Nevis, saying that Dame Marcella, who is the Governor-General, is coming to England in April,” Daly said.
“She’s meeting King Charles, I think it was around the 1st of April.
“Then what she would like to do is she would like to visit a football club who do a lot of work in the local community. She wanted a London club, an inner-city club, and wanted to look at the work they do in the community and how the impact of a football club could be used to impact the residents.
“She wrote to the PFA, she also knows Bryan King who’s one of our ex-players, and they suggested that why not go and visit Millwall? They really work very closely with the council, with the police, with all local partners in the area and they’ll really show you how a football club can impact the residents. So that’s how it came about really. Then we set the plans in for her to visit last Saturday.”
“What I did was I showed her around the trust. I showed her where we’re based out of and the work we do. Then I did a presentation for about 20 minutes on the work we do with Lewisham and Southwark, and how we engage with the local residents. So I went through some of our programs, like anti-social behavior programs. I went through our employment programs, our health programs, our education.
“They said some of the things that they would take. What they have at the moment is they have football clubs over there, but all they deliver is sport. They want to now see what is the responsibility of things like a football club or an athletics club. How can they engage with the young people? So she wanted to take our model and see if she could use some of that model back where she comes from.
“We have a job centre based here at the stadium, she liked that idea, having it somewhere away from government, having it in a place in the community. She liked the idea about the stuff we do around anti-social behavior.
“The kids turn up, play football, and then we talk to them about anti-social behavior, about getting to work about not joining gangs. She quite liked that idea.
“She just felt that there was a lot more that organizations could do in her country. She wanted to use those ideas and then she came to the game afterwards and she quite enjoyed it, especially after we got a win as well.
“During the week, she did go to see Everton vs Liverpool. She went up there because she’s a Liverpool fan, but she only watched the game. she didn’t get to speak to their community.
“We had a good five, six hours with her. Over dinner and that we spoke a lot about different things that we do. My staff going in and doing talks with young people around aspirations of employment and stuff like that, she quite liked that idea as well.”
Daly welcomes future visits to the MCT.
“We’re open to have anyone to come and visit us,” Daly said. “We have lots of organizations in the UK that did come to see us, but not many from overseas. We’ll talk about the work the club does in the community for hours and we’re very proud of what we do. It came out of the blue. But she said she’d love to visit again.
“In her letter to us it says ‘especially I’d like to talk about the initiative of community trust and the participation of everyone in the community via the club’. So she highlighted that she wanted not just to visit the club, she wanted to speak to people that are working in local community now, because she could take some of those ideas back and see if she could use them.”
