Founder of Goals4Girls
When Francesca Brown’s teenage hopes of football stardom were ended through serious injury, she struggled to come to terms with it. She fell into a deep depression before realising she needed to regroup and find a new ambition.
“It was a lot of soul-searching, a lot of self-discovery,” she explains. Combined with therapeutic support, she discovered that football was key to her wellbeing.
“Sport marries up with mental health and wellbeing,” she says. “I really learned so much. It was about releasing those positive endorphins into your body. Young people are not educated around the importance of being active and how it can have a profound and positive impact on mental wellbeing.”
Moving away from her native Manchester, Francesca became a youth worker in east London, and noticed that there were plenty of events aimed at inspiring boys and tying in with their love of football – but nothing for girls. She asked the girls she was working with what they’d like provided for them in their community, and she got a very clear response.
“They wrote down football, inspirational speakers, role models, career pathways, understanding around money – they put everything you can think about around raising their aspirations in their local community,” she recalls.
And that was how Goals4Girls was born.
Its mission statement is to support and raise the aspirations of young women and girls aged between 11 and 16 within the UK’s most marginalised communities. It’s a mission driven by the desire to break down barriers through football and mentorship in education.
More than a decade on, Francesca’s idea, born out of her talks with those young women, is now a registered personal and social development charity. Goals4Girls’ programmes give some impactful solutions to tackle gender inequalities, and their campaigns are intended to empower more women and girls to be active.
“We always say the programme is for the girls and by the girls: we’re a user-led organisation,” she explains. “I realised very quickly that a lot of the young women and girls needed female role models, so a lot of the leadership team are female, because we break down the immediate barriers for young women and girls in these communities.
Francesca started her pilot project with just seven girls. Within six months there were 40 – and then before Goals4Girls’ second birthday, there were 120 involved. There’s more to come as well.
“I am not setting out to be an organisation which is in 20 or 30 schools – that’s not my goal,” she says, pointing to her plans to run a programme focusing on sustainable development.
Twelve years after she ran those first sessions, she is now seeing grown women who benefited from Goals4Girls coming back as football coaches, peer mentors or role models to the next generation of young women and girls on their programmes.
“It’s so, so powerful just to see that we’ve been there, we’ve been able to be a part of that pathway for them,” she says. “I’ve ensured that I can be a voice for these young women and girls and give them a platform to speak their truths. I feel like it’s my duty to break down barriers.”
Francesca faced those barriers herself during her childhood and teenage years, so she understands some of the challenges young women still face: whether that’s their social and economic background, sports participation, career aspirations, or systematic racism or misogyny.
“One thing I’ve always taught the girls is to dream without limiting beliefs,” she says. “If she can see it, she can be it and she can break down barriers. Whatever these young women and girls set out to achieve, it is possible”.
