The Scunthorpe United FC Community Sports and Education Trust was launched this week. Its chief executive Lee Turnbull explains more...

Football in the Community started back in 1990 here at Scunthorpe United, as part of a national venture which commenced in 1986. It ran successfully for 18 years.

Recently, we applied for charitable status to become our own registered charity working within the football club.

The application has now gone through and we are officially a charity, which we think will benefit our organisation - hopefully increasing our activity programme and our remit across the region.

The charity is governed by a board of trustees, which includes Rex Garton (vice chairman of Scunthorpe United), Angeline Saunderson (a lifelong supporter and former national director for Football in the Community), Louise Whittaker (the club accountant) and Abid Khan (from BEM Sports).

Obviously, with charitable status comes many benefits - hopefully attracting sponsorship, accessing grants and also the kudos of being a local registered charity working within a football club.

Many football clubs are now going down this path, and we are one of the most recent ones to be accepted for charitable status.

Our work within the local community will continue as it did with Football in the Community. We will continue our work in local schools, and with local community groups - as well as working with the football club and Study United as well, who we have formed an excellent partnership with. We hope to continue and expand our work within North Lincolnshire.

We are working very closely with the football club and the Football League now on many different social inclusion issues, which we feel as a charitable trust are very important not only to the football club but also to the local community.

We are working with groups who have young people with disabilities, local community groups and with disadvantaged young people, as well as with older people.

As a charity we are looking to work with people right across the broad spectrum of the wider community, from five up to the age of 85.

And through the Football League Trust we aim to expand upon those partnerships and be more efficient and effective with our working relationships within the local community, and hopefully the charitable status will help in respect of being more accessible to the wider community as well.