Community

During the year our Fitness Firsters at our Support Centre have taken a local organisation to heart and undertaken various actives to raise funds.

The organisation is ‘Over The Wall’ who provide holiday camps for children between 8 – 17 who are affected by serious illness. These children spend many months undergoing treatment and hospital visits. The camps help them rebuild confidence and self-esteem, they undertake new activities, have fun and make friends.

Staff donated a vast array of Christmas presents and raised £1600 through various activities including a charity football match. We are also organising a 300 mile cycling event this summer to support them along with offering one of our team the opportunity to volunteer for a week to support one of the camps. This will give someone the chance to directly get involved with the children and share their experience with their colleagues.

Fitness First Australia is committed to providing opportunities for every Australian teenager to improve their health, fitness and lifestyle. At this very impressionable age, it’s important we encourage teenagers to learn and practice healthy habits to help improve their overall fitness and wellbeing.

The Fitness First Initiative for Teenagers (FFIT) is a FREE community initiative aimed at encouraging Australian teenagers to get active by allowing them to access Fitness First clubs for free during school holidays and also during the school term.

With the help of Australian Olympic swimming sensation and FFIT ambassador - Geoff Huegill, there are now over a quarter of a million free training sessions done by teens in Australian Fitness First clubs each year.

In March 2010 Fitness First co-partnered with NDTV-TOYOTA GREENATHON for raising money for TERI’s (The Energy and Resources Institute, an independent, not-for-profit, research institute focused on energy, environment and sustainable development) initiative to ‘Lighting a Billion Lives’.

Fitness First held a 12-hour Group Exercise Event called GXATHON comprising of a variety of GX classes. Every participating member contributed and Fitness First ended up raising Rs. 250k. The GXATHON was aired live by NDTV. TERI used the money to purchase solar lanterns to provide light to an entire village.

We care and strive to make the world a fitter place. We love this challenge and Iove to see how much energy and passion Fitness Firsters invest in this mission. In 2009 one of our clubs in Frankfurt sold fitness bars – donated by one of our partners – for their 89 years old member Gerda, who had been a victim of robbery. The same year the German team supported the "Human Race" with our national partner and supplier NIKE. In every city we motivated people to run 10 kilometres together with

runners from all over the world to support social activities. The same time all Fitness Firsters around the world started collecting money for our team members in the Philippines, who have become

Each country in Asia has a community committee which sits every 6- 8 weeks to ensure that we continue to encourage the involvement of our staff and members alike in giving back to the communities in which we operate. During the year there were in excess of 50 separate events ranging from blood donation drives, to fund raisers for the breast cancer foundation through our Group Exercise activity. Our Singapore Team took our community value to new levels when our in house band "The Fitter 7" wrote and recorded our community song on CD. The lyric "help someone now, to run their hardest mile" resonates in the Fitness First community as we so often come together in the spirit of health and fitness to help those less fortunate. The next big project is with our "Planet First" theme where hundreds will come together in starting the plantation of hundreds of saplings in what we call the "Fitness First Valley" at the forestry reserve in central Malaysia.