TUESDAY afternoon, Sandhill View Academy in Sunderland, and a football coaching session is taking place in the school sports hall. Jack Ramsey, a second-year coaching student, takes a couple of pupils to one side to run through what he expects from them in the next series of drills. So far, so routine.

You don’t have to look long, though, to notice a couple of things that mark out this session as somewhat unusual. First, there is almost total silence. Jack is deaf, and all the pupils playing suffer from hearing disorders. Instructions are given in sign language, team-mates communicate via an elaborate series of hand gestures. It is quite a thing to behold.

Then, there is the identity of the goalkeepers at either end of the pitch. One side is trying to score past Duncan Watmore, the other is attempting to beat Lee Camp. Insert your own punchline here if you have to.

Welcome to the Foundation of Light, Sunderland Football Club’s registered charity that has been carrying out a whole host of positive initiatives across the North-East since 2001. Initially the brainchild of former chairman, Sir Bob Murray, the Foundation has grown to become a force for good that employs more than 100 members of staff and works with more than 6,000 adults and children every week.

Jack is one of those adults, having first come into contact with the Foundation when he attended one of the first hearing impairment coaching sessions at Crowtree Leisure Centre more than a decade ago. He is now studying for BTEC and FA coaching qualifications, on a Foundation scheme, at East Durham College.

“The Foundation has been great for me,” he said. “When I was little, it gave me a chance to play football and be just like everyone else. Now, it’s helping me do what I love. I’m studying to get my qualifications, and at the same time I’m coaching children who are in the position I once was. I don’t think I’d have been able to do any of this if the Foundation wasn’t there.”

Quite rightly, Sunderland has had quite a kicking in the last few years. From the abject handling of the Adam Johnson case to the decline in fortunes on the field that means the club could be relegated to League One tomorrow, a series of shockingly bad decisions have shredded the reputation of an institution that was once regarded as one of the most stable and well-run in the country.

Yet the sight of another defeat in front of a half-empty Stadium of Light is only part of the story. A football club is more than simply what happens on a Saturday afternoon, and in so many other ways, Sunderland continue to get an awful lot of things right. That should not be overlooked amid the clamour to apportion blame for what has gone wrong on the pitch.

Whether it is the club’s deep-rooted and heartfelt support for the Bradley Lowery Foundation, or the recent decisions to open a sensory viewing room at the Stadium of Light to assist youngsters with autism or throw open the stadium doors to shelter homeless people, Sunderland have consistently displayed a level of social consciousness that merits praise.

Then there is the Foundation, which is about to formally open the Beacon of Light, in the shadow of the club’s stadium. A new facility that will offer sporting opportunities as well as educational programmes, a health centre and a venue for music concerts and events, the Beacon will attempt to tackle issues such as obesity, unemployment and a shortage of skills by harnessing the power that the football club still possesses. It will officially open at the start of June, and has the potential to be a profound influence on Wearside, South Tyneside and County Durham.

“From the first minute I came to this club, I knew what it meant to the local community,” said Kevin Ball, club legend and former skipper. “Denis Smith would get us out there pretty much every week, doing talk-ins with the supporters. He wanted to get you out there to understand the people you were playing for and representing, and as a club, I don’t think we’ve ever lost that.

“Over the years, I think the club has been very good at trying to maintain that closeness with the supporters and the community. I think our football club is such a pivotal part of the community, and it’s vital we do whatever we can to try to use our position to help.

“I’m a big believer that whether you’re top of the league, bottom of the league, or somewhere in the middle, a consistency of what you do in the community has to be upheld. That shouldn’t change with your results.”

Nevertheless, if Sunderland were to be relegated, there would inevitably be repercussions. If Ellis Short remains in charge, further job losses are likely, and serious questions would have to be asked about the club’s category one academy status. It costs a lot of money to run an elite academy, but if Sunderland were to tighten the purse strings, a generation of youngsters would miss out.

The Foundation does not receive direct financial support from the club – Tuesday’s session was funded by the Premier League BT Disability Initiative – but it benefits massively from the kudos of being intrinsically connected with such a well-known sporting name and also shares kit, equipment and personnel. It would be a crying shame if that relationship was affected by failures on the field.

“We’re the football club’s charity, and always will be,” said Liz Barton-Jones, head of sport and wellbeing at the Foundation. “We might not get direct funding from the club, but we use the power of the branding and badge to engage with populations and groups that would otherwise be much harder to reach.

“Football opens doors, and the football club is one of the few things that is immediately recognisable to pretty much everyone around here. It’s the hook that gets people interested, and then hopefully they’re more willing to listen to us and see what we’ve got to offer. That’s pretty much integral to what we do.”

That relationship was evident on Tuesday, as youngsters queued to take a pot shot at Watmore. At the same time, three other players were taking part in another community initiative.

These are not easy times for Sunderland, a club on its knees. No matter what happens tomorrow, though, it would be unfair to paint things as wholly negative.