Clubbing In Has Reached The Final 5 Stage (Voting Closed)

Over the last few weeks, you've been nominating clubs and community groups across Waterford that deserve to win €3,000, thanks to GSK Dungarvan and it's now time to reveal the Clubbing In final 5.

Community is the heart of GSK Dungarvan and they want to give back, by awarding the winning club or community group with €3,000.

After much deliberation from our independent judging panel, we can now reveal the Clubbing In final 5.

In no particular order, huge congratulations to -

Little Vikings Special Olympics, Clashmore and Kinsalebeg Community Council, Laochas The Warrior Soul Project, Dungarvan United AFC and Saint Christopher's Community Ambulance.

Scroll down to vote for your Clubbing In champion (make sure after you tick your winner, that you then click 'vote now') or find out a little more about each finalist below.

Little Vikings Special Olympics Waterford

Little Vikings Young Athletes Club is Waterford’s newest Special Olympics club which caters for children with intellectual disabilities between the ages of 4 and 12 years old. This is the first club of its kind in Waterford with its focus on children in this youngest age category (all other Special Olympics clubs have starting age of 8 years old) giving them an introduction to sporting and physical activities tailored to their individual requirements not available in any other club. Based at the Butler Community Centre, John’s Park with a team of over 20 coaches, volunteers and committee members, the club currently caters for 30 young athletes in two weekly sessions.

Clashmore and Kinsalebeg Community Council

The Community Council was set up in 2016 to improve the community spirit in the area. Clashmore and Kinsalebeg are 2 small villages in the West of the County. An executive committee was set up to work with local groups like Tidy Towns and the GAA to improve facilities, raise the profile of the area and more importantly the sense of belonging. As an umbrella organisation, the group has been successful in obtaining grants to build a Community Gym, to run classes in art and computers, to have family fun days and to tackle local issues like litter on the roads.

The group are a Sustainable Energy Community and have produced an Energy Master Plan for the area looking at ways to reduce energy consumption and ways to produce green energy. One of their key objectives is to improve community resilience so they can respond positively and quickly to unplanned events.

Laochas The Warrior Soul Project

Laochas formed in 2018 to tackle the need for mental health services for young people. Focusing on preventive steps and crisis support by offering children the opportunity to become more aware and to have a healthy understanding of mental health. The Laochas team go into schools with a three week programme helping young people understand their emotions, how to process them and give them basic tools to cope along with breaking the stigma surrounding mental health and looking for help.

Every programme is specifically tailored to each age group by qualified professionals including a mindfulness teacher, music and art therapists. The group's aim is that every child gets to experience a safe, fun space to better understand and learn to cope with mental health and wellbeing.

Dungarvan United AFC

Dungarvan United is an ever growing club with ethos on football for all. The club has been active in Dungarvan for over 50 years and they have always been about giving back to the community. When the pandemic hit, Dungarvan United started 'Heels For Meals On Wheels' where they asked club members to walk 5k and donate €5. This raised €1000 for Deise Daycare Centre. In November 2020 Dungarvan United Waterford Online Bingo was formed.

Ran by a small team of volunteers who saw a need to bring people together online during lockdown. This gave people, many who were cocooning a link to the outside world. When children moved to home-schooling, the club knew lockdown could effect them so they ran a free kids bingo. Through the pandemic, the club made donations to local charities such as Surprise Surprise and have hosted fundraising bingos for Tallow Camogie and Dungarvan Boxing Club which helped these organisations bring in vital funds and just last Sunday the club donated the profits from bingo to Helvic RNLI.

Saint Christopher's Community Ambulance

Saint Christopher's Community Ambulance are a group of volunteers from the Emergency Services who transport cancer care patients to appointments that they have no way of getting to, or who have no one to bring them. The group also provides a service to bring Palliative Care patients home to their loved ones without the expense of having to pay for a private ambulance.

The group do what they do because they have all had family members taken from them due to cancer and hope to help ease the burden and high costs of cancer care treatments for members of the community. Currently it costs €350.00 per week to fuel the ambulance for the volume of calls, so winning Clubbing In would help with that.

Make sure after you tick your winner, that you then click VOTE NOW.