The charity's logo will be on Coventry City's home shirt for the Capital One Cup clash against Cardiff...
Coventry City Football Club’s charity partner for the 2014/15 season will be Coventry Community Responders (CCR).
The charity, which was established in 2009 by two serving police officers, attend 999 calls on behalf of the West Midlands Ambulance service, and provide potentially life saving treatment until the nearest available ambulance arrives.
The Coventry Community Responders have 21 active volunteers trained to a nationally recognised level by the West Midlands Ambulance Service who – coupled with their full-time jobs – between them aim to be on duty 24-hours a day, seven days a week.
They are fully trained in handling a variety of different situations including heart attacks, strokes and cardiac arrest.
As part of the partnership, the CCR will receive a number of benefits from the club, including signed merchandise, bucket collections and promotional support.
And communications officer for the charity, Gary Edwards, believes the new partnership with the football club will be a massive step for the charity.
“It’s great to be involved with Coventry City and we’re really pleased to be affiliated with them,” Gary said.
“We see it as a massive step – we want to make people aware of us and our volunteers who all work extremely hard. We’d love to get more publicity and of course more volunteers so we have the opportunity to save more lives.
“Hopefully the increased publicity for us will mean we can raise more funds, in which we can run our responder car, train more volunteers through the West Midlands Ambulance service and to help maintain the excellent work of our team.
“We volunteer because we enjoy it, and while it can be stressful at times, we’re saving people’s lives which is incredible really.
“We’ve recently just trained five new volunteers to increase our presence within Coventry and Warwickshire, and they will be active with us soon.
“We’re delighted to be partnered with Coventry City and hope this season will be good not just for the football club but for us as well!”
The charity’s logo will feature on the Sky Blues home strip for the Capital One Cup clash with Cardiff City, and development director Steve Waggott said the club was delighted to be working with the organisation.
He said: “We’re pleased to be partnering with a charity which undertakes such fantastic work around Coventry and Warwickshire but whose work often goes under the radar.
“The volunteers work extremely hard to help save people’s lives with their often time-critical treatment and we hope that the profile that this partnership brings can help them to raise much-needed funds and awareness for them.
“We see this partnership as a key element of our community engagement across Coventry and the wider Warwickshire area.”
For more information on the CCR you can follow them on Twitter via @Covresponders or e-mail Gary Edwards on garyedwards500@gmail.com.