On Monday 3rd February 2025 the Lord-Lieutenant presented Portico Vine ARLFC with The King’s Award for Voluntary Service.
The citation for the award read, “Reaches far beyond the field of play – working WITH the community, FOR the community.”
It was an honour to meet the members of this wonderful club. The KAVS is awarded to exceptional groups of volunteers who are making a positive impact on their community and benefiting others through their work. The Portico Vine ARLFC volunteers certainly do that, not only coaching groups of young boys and girls to play rugby league football, they have teams at all ages up to Masters in their seventies and eighties! They take the young people on holidays, help youths with disabilities, run social events, coffee mornings and carol services open to all members of the community and donate huge amounts of food to the local foodbank.
The club is open seven days per week, is completely volunteer run with no paid staff and is extremely friendly and welcoming. The warm atmosphere is tangible. Congratulations to all of those volunteering at Portico Vine ARLFC – this is clearly a well deserved award.
Many thanks to the Mayor of St. Helens, Cllr Jeanette Banks and the Leader of the Council, Cllr Anthony Burns for attending and showing your support.
The Lord-Lieutenant is pictured below presenting the award to Mark Hobin the Chair, and Mrs. Karen Smith. Also pictured are Deputy Lieutenants Nicholas Wainwright MBE DL and Sir Andrew Cooke QPM DL who undertook the local assessment for the award.
The volunteers were each presented with an individual KAVS lapel badge.
