Join former Norwich City player Alan Arber on Thursday 13th February to hear his real life story of sexual abuse in sport. Please note this session will contain details of extreme child sexual abuse and may contain triggers. There will be a dedicated space on the evening should the content become too overwhelming. Join Alan Arber and The Offside Trust on Thurdsay 13th February 2025 to hear firsthand his harrowing personal story of sexual abuse in sport. This workshop will cover key areas to identifying abuse, dealing with concerns and improving confidence in reporting procedures. This event will be the launch of HSP's Coach Education Week 2025. The theme for this years programme is safeguarding and welfare which is highly topical given the recent Sport England investment into a national network of Sport Welfare Officers. The Offside Trust is an organisation founded and run by survivors of child sexual abuse in sport, established as an independent body to work alongside clubs, organisations and other charitable bodies to futher enhance safeguarding at all levels of sport. The key aims of the trust are to raise awareness of the importance of safeguarding across all sport at all levels, to provide survivors with advice, guidance and resources to aid the healing journey and to campaign for legal and regulatory changes to improve safeguarding within sport. Alan has stated that The Offside Trust have been hugely supportive and helpful and given him the strength to deal with what happened to him.

On becoming an Ambassador for the Offside Trust, I felt that my role was to raise awareness in East Anglia. One of the big issues I had regarding my abuse was the total lack of support I could access from day one. Myself and my wonderful volunteer Barry Howard developed a strategy to ensure that everyone who needed support in East Anglia knew where to find it and had people to talk to on the bad days - something which I never had until now. We started out by sending a tweet to all the local clubs in the Norfolk area asking if they would like to support our work and allow us to get the word out via the medium of non- league football. I was contacted by Mulbarton FC and met the chairman Duane James who agreed that they would support our work. Every Mulbarton team from under 7s through to mens, ladies and veterans would wear the Offside Trust logo on their shirts and the club put up a sponsored board. This created quite a stir and many teams got in touch regarding working with us and many meetings ensued. We introduced the idea of ‘Awareness Days’ where we would visit clubs to allow people to talk to us face to face and discuss any issues they had. Our first Awareness Day was at Great Yarmouth FC and was an excellent success. We spoke to many people about our work and most importantly one person came forward with abuse issues who we were able to direct to the right support and advice. We must thank Martyn Sinclair and Rob McCombe for their help on the day. A bucket collection also raised £100 for the Trust. From this first Awareness Day, we were contacted by many clubs and leagues to ask how they could come on board and one such club was Shrublands FC, a club in Gorleston. I went to meet Andy Hannah the general manager of the club and he invited Shaun Platten to the meeting who was chairman of the Norfolk Suffolk Youth League. So successful was this meeting we were invited to their next meeting and I spoke for the first time publicly about my abuse and what we were doing to raise awareness and offer support to the league. From this small start we really started to pick up pace and phone calls never seemed to stop regarding clubs and leagues wanting to come on board. Darrell Hibbert of East Point Sports has been wonderful in helping us get the correct merchandise which we sell on the Awareness Days to raise funds for our work. We sell mugs, beanie tats, corner flag sets, medical kits, water bottles and our popular Captain’s Respect armbands (we have sold over 100 of these).