Marcus Rashford echoes many people who believe it is about us not them:
Marcus Rashford has said he hopes he can use his profile to help change society for the better and that people are now “willing to make that first step towards being heard”.
The England and Manchester United star has been widely praised for helping to secure food vouchers worth £15 a week for disadvantaged children over the summer.
He told Sky Sports News it was “a bit crazy” the campaign had worked and he was happy he will be able to make a difference to people’s lives.
Speaking about how footballers can inspire change, the 22-year-old said fellow England player Raheem Sterling’s reaction to being racially abused was a “turning point”.
“Now people are willing to make that first step towards being heard and I think the first important factor for that was Raheem, when he went through his situation being racially abused how he stood up to that,” he said.
“He’s not afraid to come out and speak about it and it’s definitely changed how to approach situations for people in the sport.”
While the recent Black Lives Matter protests have shone a spotlight on racial inequality, Rashford said his generation is more willing to speak out.
“We have to make England what we want it to look like… My view on it is it’s a generational thing. Generations change and people improve as humans should.
“I feel like now this generation that we’re in, we’re not afraid to stand up and be counted for and it’s definitely a positive thing.”
Discussing his campaign to provide children with food vouchers, Rashford said children going without meals puts “a lot of stress on parents’ heads and it leads to other things”.
“I’ve seen first hand how it can spiral out of control and people can literally end up on the streets because of not having meals throughout the day,” he said.
“It’s not only the food situation that I was thinking about when I was raising that awareness, it’s other stuff – mental health and the well-being of people and families.”
He added: “It might not seem like a big thing but something like not eating every day or not eating the right amount of meals every day can have a big impact on your life.”
The 22-year-old has previously spoken about how his family had relied on free school meals, food banks and soup kitchens while he was growing up.
But he told SSN that he was “one of the lucky ones” as other people would often help him out.
“At times if my mum was working late and she wasn’t at home, I knew I could go one or two minutes to one of my friends’ houses and they would always put something on a plate for me,” he said.
“There was ways around it for me personally. Even from a young age I understood that for some people there’s not ways around it, so who’s helping them?”
Despite earning the praise of many and making the newspaper front pages, Rashford said the focus should not be on himself: “It’s about the people who it’s affecting”.
