SCRAPPERS Gym is one step closer to winning a substantial grant to help to improve its facilities.

Members of the Hillmead gym put themselves forward for an Aviva Community Fund grant last month and in order to be shortlisted they needed to secure public votes.

This week Aviva has announced that Scrappers was successful in making the cut and now must wait to hear whether they will be awarded a grant of between £10,000 to £25,000 to be put towards employing a full-time boxing club manager, enabling the gym to be open during the day.

This in turn would allow Scrappers to build stronger links with external partners local authorities, county sports partnerships, schools and England Boxing to enable them to support more people.

CEO Olivia McCann said: “The Scrappers Community Gym Team and everyone at the Swindon Children’s Scrapstore are delighted to have reached the finals of the Aviva Community Fund Competition.

“We could not have done it without the support of local people and also Thames Water who helped us to increase our votes by sharing the voting link around their staff.

“Out of the 264 projects in our category ‘Inclusivity’ we were one of eight projects to reach the finals and we managed to get the most votes with 8,151. I would personally like to thank everyone that voted for us to help us reach the finals.”

A judging panel will now decide on which charity gets awarded the funds and the winners will be announced on January 16.