Funding for New Mats Provided by Queensland Government’s Gambling Community Benefit Fund

 

Late last year our Head Instructor and then President, Danny James applied on behalf of Griffith Aikido to Queensland Government’s Gambling Community Benefit Fund (GCBF) for a grant to help fund the purchase of new mats for our Nathan dojo.  Although we also made a contribution to the purchase of the mats, this valuable acquisition would not have been possible without the $6,724 provided by GCBF.  With those funds we were able to purchase three 10m x 2m rubber-based carpet strip mats and sixty-four rubber jig-saw mats. 

 

We are absolutely thrilled to receive this funding because we can now offer a much wider range of options for children and teens within our club.  As you may be aware our child and youth membership has undergone huge growth in the last 12 months.  Our Nippers, Aikikids and teens classes currently run on Saturday mornings and we are now looking at additional time slots.  Our Aikikids program allows children under the age of 12 years to learn the principles of Aikido, the Art of Peace, through fun and structured play.  They benefit from the art of aikido, but also from the confidence, self-respect, self-discipline and strongly positive social interaction that aikido develops.  Our ‘teens’ program gives teenagers the same benefits of aikido and personal protection, and adds further value by contributing awareness skills and assertive non-engagement techniques which are highly practical for the realities of secondary school social situations. 

 

The new strip mats will enable us to run larger children’s and teens classes and provide more children with the opportunity to do aikido.  Even more importantly, the new mats will significantly enhance safety as numbers grow by simply providing more mat space on which children can train, but also by allowing the separation of children of different abilities into smaller distinct groups in the same training area.

 

The new jigsaw mats improve our capacity to offer the benefits of aikido and self-defence programs to school children, at their school.  We have visited many schools over the past twelve months, including a small group of autistic children at Marsden Special School.  Ages have ranged from pre-schoolers to 15 year olds.  We now have the capacity to increase our school visitation program because we can conveniently carry the new jig saw mats with us to ensure a larger, much softer and even safer play environment for school children.  Provision of school aikido classes and self-defence programs were previously determined either by the existence of appropriate mats at a school, or by the ability of club members to source a vehicle able to carry heavy and bulky gymnastics mats.  We will now be more mobile and essentially be able to visit any school requesting aikido and self-defence classes with mats only used for schools usage. 

 

The new mats are an exciting addition to what we do, as they provide our club with a much greater ability to disseminate aikido and the benefits of aikido to the wider community in a much stronger way.  I acknowledge the strong contribution of the Gambling Community Benefit Fund to our club’s activities, and look forward to the continued strong expansion of the children’s classes within our club, as well as our schools program.

 

Finally I would like to encourage all members who receive this Skukan News e-letter to forward this particular edition to all your friends and family.  We are extremely grateful for the valuable funding support received from the Gambling Community Benefit Fund.  Accordingly we are proud to publish our formal acknowledgment below.

 

“The Queensland Government’s Gambling Community Benefit Fund provided $6,724 to Griffith Aikido Institute Inc for the purchase of three 10mx2m rubber-based carpet strip mats and sixty-four rubber jig-saw mats”