Launching our new look, with a 3-year catch-up!

We’ve not been posting on our website, but we’ve certainly been getting the climbing in!

In fact, we have been more active than ever. Since last November we’ve adopted a fortnightly pattern of sessions. Our climbers have got stuck into more of what matters to them. We’ve been running training events for our volunteers. We’ve provided student placements for the first time, broadening perceptions of disability in future healthcare.

Maximising involvement and visibility of disabled climbers is part of our mission, and some climbers have been getting involved in related outdoor and paralympic events. We have teamed up with Climb, a charity that works to remove some of the barriers to climbing and hillwalking in Guernsey and the Peak District, for some of our climbers to try some outdoor action.

All of us at Climbing for All Sheffield are volunteers, and volunteers make us who we are. We have a bigger core group involved in planning and process, and making climbing sessions more geared to individual needs. We asked all our climbers what matters to them, and how we can make climbing even better. Some climbers want to work towards awards or independent climbing, while others want to learn new things, or to experience the exhilaration of climbing, or to be at a sociable session. We set up some new sessions:

Buddy Thursday! A busy evening session, with teen and adult climbers upskilling their climbing.

Climb Friday! Morning and afternoon sessions for small groups of mainly adults and young adults, with plenty of volunteer assistance, focused on individual goals. We also added a third bespoke group session for some young wheelchair users.

Send Saturday! Two or three sessions, small and larger groups of mainly children, young people and young adults to work on individual goals.

The experience gained by Foundry instructors in assisting differently abled climbers means that we can introduce some climbers who approach us to the Foundry to book bespoke sessions, e.g. for rehabilitation therapy, or to take a family group climbing. We also fit in taster sessions for new climbers ourselves, waiting list permitting.

What else? Well, there’s our revamped website, which we hope is now more accessible. It certainly works better with screen readers than it did, and we have paid attention to layout and colours. Feedback welcome! We are going to enlarge the website to include details of our processes, e.g. our volunteer development programme. We will be adding Stripe credit card payment to our donations page (you can use BACS or PayPal for now). And we hope to post an update on our activities approximately monthly – so do sign up below for updates.

We’re now back from our summer break, and the fortnightly sessions are running again. It’s time to write the latest annual report, covering our 7^th year of operation. You can get the last two reports from the Charity Commission portal or download them here: FY21-22 report for Charity Commission and FY22-23 report for Charity Commission.

Hope you’ll stay in touch!