March Boxing Club honoured with Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service

March Amateur Boxing Club has been honoured with the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service, the highest accolade a voluntary group can receive in the UK.

Established 70 years ago, the club provides boxing training, including general fitness and gym work for children aged eight upwards, and adults.

The club is run entirely by volunteers and achieves remarkable results with little funding, relying entirely on the goodwill of the volunteers.

There are 10 coach volunteers, who come from a variety of backgrounds and have gained All England Boxing coaching accreditation at their own expense. Overall it has around 250 active members, of which around 150 attend in any week.

The club is one of 230 charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups to receive the prestigious award this year.

The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service aims to recognise outstanding work by volunteer groups to benefit their local communities.

It was created in 2002 to celebrate the anniversary of The Queen’s Coronation and is always announced on June 2 to tie in with Volunteers’ Week, which runs June 1-7 every year.

Representatives of March Amateur Boxing Club will receive the award from Julie Spence OBE QPM, Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire, later in the year.

The Lord Lieutenant said: “I want to congratulate all the inspirational volunteers at the March Amateur Boxing Club for their exemplary contribution to the health, well-being and life skills of generations of young people in March over the last 70 years.

“The selfless giving of their time, skills and enthusiasm has been rightly recognised by Her Majesty the Queen.”

Coach Frank Allen told the Citizen: “This is a prestigious award and is a reward for all the volunteers and all their hard work – the coaches, the trainers and the participants themselves.

“We are all really proud of the achievement – I have had phone calls from all over the place, including from six other boxing clubs from as far afield as Liverpool and even a guy
in Norway.

“Hundreds and hundreds of kids have come through this club over the years and this is recognition for all the hard work we have put in.

“It teaches discipline and respect and they get this good mental and physical routine. We’ve got some very good youngsters at the club.”

Training has been suspended at the club since the COVID-19 lockdown in March but an announcement in early July could see some sort of return to action next month.