Vision Sports Ireland and NCBI are about to formally announce their great merge.
Two of Ireland’s greatest ever athletes will join us to launch the NCBI Vision Sports Ireland merge. 5 times Paralympic gold medallist Jason Smyth will join Olympic silver medallist and double World Cross Country Champion John Tracey to officially bring NCBI and Vision Sports together.
Jason and John will formally open a whole new world for blind and vision impaired people here with greater participation, more sports and leisure, increased availability of facilities and services.
Together 30 years ago we founded Irish Blind Sports (now Vision Sports Ireland) … we have moved from strength to strength and we are now in a place we could only dream of way back then.
The success is down to four factors
- You, our members, our supporters.
- Sport Ireland (who through a variety of grants have more than doubled our budget in the past 2 years).
- Key donors including our President Prof. Michael O’Keeffe.
- the NCBI.
From our early days, the NCBI have supported us through thick and thin with funds and facilities.
Here are our big merge wins…
REACH: The tag line of our Strategic Plan “Towards 2022 Vision” reads “it’s all about reach”. The reality is NCBI can provide us with 10 times more reach than we currently have. We should expect, over time, several times more participants in Vision Sports promoted activities and better health, wellbeing and quality of life for blind/vision impaired people across the land. Both NCBI and Vision Sports want to fundamentally encourage greater access to sport for people with sight loss across the country.
- OVERALL PACKAGE: NCBI will provide a generous overall package, which will greatly exceed the highest ever support from NCBI to Vision Sports.
- RESOURCE SUPPORT: The proposed NCBI package will subsume many significant costs which we incur here at Vision Sports: insurance, legal, professional, accountancy, auditors, IT, telephone, postage, stationery and rent. The NCBI also propose to provide supports for HR, communications, fundraising, secretarial as well as governance code implementation costs.
- SPORTS DEVELOPMENT: We currently employ 2 part-time Sports Development Officers. To support our rapidly developing programmes Vision Sports needs significant additional supports. NCBI, as part of their overall package, propose to immediately fund the employment of at least1.6 Sports Development Officers
- RINGFENCING OF FUNDS: The principle of donor intent is key. All existing Vision Sports funds, as well as all specific future grants and fundraising for Vision Sports will be used for the intended purpose of supporting Vision Sports activities. NCBI accounts will reflect the restricted use of any such donated funds.
Adding this all together these developments will allow Vision Sports to concentrate on core sports development as well as progressing our Inclusion Games and MayFest. Time distractions that arise from the current administrative burden of running a standalone charity and company will be removed.
One small step for VI men (and woman), one giant leap for VI sport and leisure.