Despite a long 15-year footballing career, Grant has always wanted to give back to the part of Merseyside he grew up in. <\/p>\n
“Community has always been a big part of my childhood, we had it then.<\/p>\n
“Empathy, respect and humility were built in, I grew up under great role models,” he said.<\/p>\n
The position of role models is central to their work, to boost the attitudes and attendance of those children who have previously not suited mainstream school. <\/p>\n
He said: “We’ve taken kids who had an attendance record of about 15% and then under us, we’ve got them up to 90%”.<\/p>\n
The school runs several courses including construction and pathways into footballing coaching and playing – an avenue close to Grant’s heart – but all taught in a judgement-free space.<\/p>\n
“They walk around our place like they own it – there’s no hierarchy,” he added.<\/p>\n
The former footballer, who later became first team coach at Blackburn Rovers said football was “the hook” to support kids in the region, in which the parallels between football and life are not lost on Grant.<\/p>\n
He said: “But they’re living in an era of social media, it becomes quite scary at times and it’s easy to become housebound and disenfranchised.<\/p>\n
“Robbie Fowler’s been in to have a conversation with all of them, they were all Reds so they were all made up.<\/p>\n
“Most of these kids won’t be footballers, but they can all become a little better in themselves [along the way],” he said.<\/p>\n
Grant’s empathy hasn’t gone unnoticed by friends and the community alike, yet he said he is doing whatever anyone else would do.<\/p>\n
“Everyone’s got it [in them], but not everyone puts themselves in that position,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite a long 15-year footballing career, Grant has always wanted to give back to the part of Merseyside…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":526557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-526556","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}