Barry has re-launched his collection and he has currently collected more than 11k items of kit since he first started in 2012. He was interviewed on BBC Radio Merseyside recently and they are very supportive as they plug the collection periodically and also have a storage bin in their reception. Good luck Barry and keep up the great work.

Last Sunday our founder Derrick Williams MBE had the pleasure of meeting his namesake.

Bristol City held a kit amnesty earlier this season and collected over 600 shirts for us. They arranged for their number 3, Derrick Williams, to meet up with our very own Derrick Williams after the game where they did a photo on the pitch.

Young Derrick was born in Germany with and American Dad and an Irish Mother, so he has the choice of playing for 3 countries. Apart from their mutual name, there unfortunately weren't any other similarities and our Derrick was disappointed to find out the Bristol City player's middle name isn’t Walter!!!! 

Thanks to Trustee Nick Perchard we received a donation of £500 from the Premier League from their charity fund (from not sending Christmas cards).

This will help us towards our expenses and as previously mentioned, we need to try and raise as much as we can in 2015 now that we have to keep £5k in reserve in case of a public liability insurance claim.

If anyone would like to run a marathon, do a parachute jump or anything sponsored for KitAid we will be very grateful. We have managed to avoid fund raising for 16 years but sadly now need to ask for a bit of financial support.

I have always wanted to establish twinning links between grass root clubs who support us and teams in Africa. Following the recent visit by Father Joe from the Jesuit Mission Zimbabwe project I am pleased to finally have got things moving on this idea.

We are starting slowly with a few clubs we know well (Garston Ladies, Woolton Juniors and Tring Tornadoes) and once it is up and running we will extend the invites to other teams.

I am really hopeful it will bring benefits to both parties and will not involve very much from us once the initial twinning partnership has been set up.

I think everyone is aware that we reached this point in early November and it was recognised first at the Airdrieonians FC visit, followed by the boxing up session and most recently at the Graham Taylor event at Watford FC.

We have received some good press coverage and a great reaction to the special You Tube film clip made at boxing up.

If you haven’t seen it yet please take a look.

Many thanks to Rebecca Akkad from Affinity Water for making this film and for creating such a great piece of work.

Here’s to the next 250k!!

On 8 November a small group of us visited the team from Airdrie and had a fantastic day meeting the people who had put so much effort in to collecting 4k items of kit for us. I was able to give a presentation in the club house and present thank you certificates to the people who had put in a lot of effort. 

It was also great to meet Dougy Allsop after months of conversations by email. This was a unique project and one which I think could easily be replicated by other clubs.

We also made AFC the 7th club to become a KitAid Ambassador Club. The 250k banner made its debut on the pitch and we were hosted in a box for the game, which AFC won 2 – 0, against Stenhousemuir (ironically another KitAid Ambassador club).

We enjoyed a lively night out afterwards with Dougy and his team, who were great hosts. We have built a really good relationship with the club now and will be visiting them again next season.

KitAid is now the proud owner of a container to help with the storage of items at our couriers site in Harlow.

A massive thank you to the Facilities team from Affinity Water who donated and delivered the container to 5Speed couriers.

This has become essential as we have recently filled all of the storage capacity at the couriers and we needed the container to act as an overflow until we clear some space.

The kit is arriving so quickly though that as soon as we clear space we seem to fill it back up again.

This morning ( 6 December) we held our final boxing up session for 2014 and we have broken all previous records.

The total number of boxes sent out during the year amounted to 1,201 and we sorted, packed and donated a massive 42,035 individual items of kit.

This brings the overall total since 1998 to an incredible figure of 262,035.

I do find it absolutely amazing that we can source that much kit, collect it from all over the country, sort it and then find the charities to come and collect it all, over 12 monthly Saturday morning boxing up sessions. It then finds its way from Hatfield to all across Africa, South America, Asia and Eastern Europe. Seriously well done everyone for making that many people smile and feel special.

As we say, it really is more than just a shirt.

I was honoured and really privileged to be invited by Graham to attend as a guest at the special celebrations held for the opening of the Graham Taylor stand at Watford FC.

It was a lovely event and the crowd really showed their appreciation for the fantastic achievements Graham achieved during his time as manager (twice) and chairman.

To receive an invitation was a sign of how Graham supports our work and we are all really proud and fortunate to have him as our Patron.

  • Airdrieonians FC visit 8 November
  • Attendance at the Herts FA Coaching seminar
  • Boxing up 15 November
  • Mitzvah Day collections 16 November 

All of the above will be great events and I will post more details in next months update, but if you do want any info before then please let me know.