Engage With the Community

Knannaites are bonded together with the single magic word Kna, which has a deep sense of community belonging and has centuries old history.  If our customs and traditions needs sustainability, then UKKCA need to engage with its members, not only members but their children as well. UKKCA leadership should find sufficient time  to develop more programs and keep the members engaged. Our next generation should have the opportunity to experience quality programs within UKKCA, which will provide them the same community bonding. Eventhough Knannaites comes under one banner, they are all different, they all have multiple interests and talents, which we need to promote through multiple activities and keep them engaged.

The recent UKKCA Badminton tournament is a good example, many of them participated not only to win the game but to share their community commitments. To share their love for the community, to meet with other members and to share their skills.  The Badminton committee members demonstrated their excellent organisational skills by completing the tournament as scheduled, they truly deserve high level of appreciation, hopefully the executive committee acknowledged it in some form. Also this was another example of  our community member’s skills and abilities to efficiently deliver  quality programs. The Mayor’s participation reflects our respect for the administrative system and our intention and capabilities to integrate with the existing community.

Comparing to last year, most of the participants improved their badminton skills and the quality of the game was excellent, it’s very encouraging to see our community members performing to professional level. New participants had the opportunity to  experience this high quality and many of them are now looking forward to improve their own skills, in order to compete better in coming years. Introducing new mixed doubles was also praiseworthy, now we need to attract our children and the ever vibrant teenagers to this game.  

To keep the community engaged, the government funding agencies support these kinds of recreational activities, Sport England is one of these agency, which  provide sufficient funds, to book venue, to purchase shuttles, to purchase trophies and to provide refreshments. Application procedures are very simple and available online, could be completed without much efforts. Being a national registered voluntary organisation, we are eligible to apply for all kinds of funds from Government and other charitable funding agencies. Obtaining these funds could potentially remove the current high registration fees and offer these games free of cost to members. Now we need committed leaders, who have knowledge, can spare time and are willing to prepare these applications along with supporting documents.