Giving homeless and socially excluded individuals an opportunity to participate in recreation, exercise and fitness activities can have a positive impact not only on their health, but also on their confidence and self-esteem. Involvement can promote new social networks, improve communication skills and, for some, encourage their move towards independence.

Often socially excluded individuals have difficulty accessing recreational and exercise facilities and resources. Freedom Social Projects aims to remove some of these barriers by developing accessible services such as the Freedom Center Gym.

The Freedom Centre Gym

The Gym / Exercise room is a new project to help improve the health, fitness and wellbeing of clients of the Day Centre. This facility provides an additional method of engaging with clients and will act as a trigger for improving self-esteem, confidence, reducing isolation as well as the obvious benefits of improving health and fitness. The majority of sessions are either 1:1 or in very small groups allowing trust and relationship to be built with the project support worker.

Anyone can benefit from participating in exercise and fitness and the gym will be made available to as wide a client group as possible.

The development of the gym also fits with the governments public health and wellbeing agenda: ‘Reclaiming people's lives and pursuing happiness.’