Help Ashleigh’s Swim School

My name is Ashleigh Robertson and I am the proud owner and swimming teacher/coach at Ashleigh's Swim School. I have always dreamt about owning my own swimming pool to run my swimming school from, which would give me the chance to really share my love and passion for swimming, as well as give back to my community. I have taught swimming for many years and have spent many hours taking part in many swimming events raising money for various projects, which have included swimming programmes for under privileged people as well as for early childhood development projects.

In October 2020 with the current Covid-19 restrictions which were preventing me from even operating, I decided that I would look at running my own swim school from my home. The decision was made to build a pool at home which would give me the ability to continue my swim school as well as give me the freedom to teach more people that could not afford it. In December I took a loan in order to make my dreams come true and construction began. Sadly on the 15th December 2020 the builder that was building my pool died in a car accident and my dreams were abruptly brought to an end.

The sad reality of the matter is that I had already paid him up front for the swimming pool and now I have a huge big hole in the ground and a loan to service. Since then I have tried to see if I could find somebody else to take on the project, but all the builders will not take it on as they say they did not start it. Through one of my very kind clients I was able to find a very experienced pool builder that has offered to finish the build for me. However the cost is way beyond my budget, especially as I am paying off a loan for the first project. This has left me with no other option but to start this page in order for me to try to fulfil my dreams.

I am absolutely devastated as I had already committed free of charge to a local NPO charity in our area to teach a group of under privileged teenagers to swim as well as to be water safe. They in turn would take these skills back to their community. Another project was with a local nursery school, where I would teach a number of their children to swim, as a high percentage of their parents cannot afford such luxuries for their children as they earn a basic wage. It is so sad that swimming is considered a luxury, when in fact it is a very important life skill.

Drowning is a huge problem in our country, as we have beautiful weather most of the year round and we have many dams and rivers, which actually are in close proximity to where a number of under privileged people reside. Sadly these folks are not taught about the dangers of water and with me working with these NPO's it would give me the opportunity to teach people about these potential dangers.

Therefore I humbly ask if anybody out there would be kind enough to donate towards this project so that I my realise my asperations and others dreams.