£2million funding boost for local communities to help get women, older people and inactive groups into sport

Areas benefitting from the scheme include: Tadcaster, Newcastle, south Dorset, Exeter, Northampton, County Durham, Lincolnshire, Stockton on Tees, Test Valley, Sheffield, Tandridge, Ashford, Newham, South Downs, Dover and Northumberland.

Older people, women, and inactive groups in England are set to benefit from thousands of pounds in funding to help them become more involved in sport.

Sport England has teamed up with sporta, whose members manage 40 per cent of community sports, leisure and culture facilities in the UK, to allocate £430,889 of National Lottery money to 17 local projects.

This means the cash will reach grassroots leisure trusts operating at the heart of communities, to help them deliver creative projects to engage inactive people in sport.

Underway in April 2013, the three and half year scheme, which received £2 million in Lottery funding, is called Make Your Move.

2015 saw the fourth round of funding, which will forge new national partnerships with well-known organisations, including Zumba, the ASA, Great Run Local, local Age UKs and Alzheimer Society branches.

Designed to meet the needs of their own towns or cities, the projects vary in content and size. But the common theme is to support community trusts so they can do things differently and find proactive and resourceful ways to engage groups that haven’t, until now, been interested in sport or exercise.

Some of the trusts will use the cash to help target unemployment or health issues, such as diabetes, through sport, which have become prevalent in their community.
Other projects have been inspired by Sport England’s This Girl Can initiative, and focus on driving up women’s and girls’ involvement.

Part of the money will go towards three trusts working together to help women over the age of 45 that lack confidence in the water, but could benefit from the mental and physical benefits of swimming.

This is being offered by Tadcaster Commuity Swimming Pool, Jesmond Community Pool in Newcastle, and Osprey Leisure Centre in south Dorset, who will work with GP surgeries, housing associations and community care facilities to target the right people.

Adapted sports, such as walking football and walking rugby, have shown to help older people, prevented from being active by social isolation, injury, illness and a lack of confidence. Active Luton launched Walking Sport for Older Men thanks to last year’s Make Your Move round 2 funding. Progress to date has seen the development and training of peer buddies, walking football tournaments and very high levels of retention.

Following on with a similar initiative, this year local trust LED is deliveringEast Devon Walking Football in four areas of East Devon, including Exmouth, Colyton/Axminster, Sidmouth and Ottery St Mary/Honiton. The programme will be aimed at both men and woman aged 55 or older, who can take part in walking football for an hour a week over 10-week blocks.
The sessions will be led by Exeter City in the Community, supported by Age UK, Devon FA, Devon and Cornwall Housing Association, the U3A and the national Older Men’s Network.

Sport England’s director of property, Charles Johnston said: “Leisure trusts play a key part in delivering high quality sports projects in towns and cities across the country.
“This investment in the 17 projects for sporta’s Make Your Move programme will give people the opportunity to take part in a way that most suits them, and get more people, more active, more often.”

Brian Leonard, sporta’s CEO said: “This Round 3 award of £430,889 from Sport England Lottery Funding for the sporta Make Your Move programme is supporting 17 new projects to deliver targeted activities within their local communities aimed at enabling inactive populations to become physically active.

“These new projects add to the current portfolio of 28 ongoing projects, which have engaged 31 different trusts across England to date. The addition of the new projects will mean that, in total, 47 trusts will have participated in the programme.

“Throughout the next year we will evaluate and share the impacts and learning from Make Your Move. This will include drawing on the experience of all Sporta trusts that have produced projects to encourage inactive people to do more sport and physical activity.”

Launched in April 2013, Make Your Move aims to get people to do at least one 30-minute session of physical activity or sport per week – and keep it up for six months or longer. The hope is that the scheme will engage 40,000 people over the three years.

More information on the programme and its impact to date can be found on the Make Your Move website or tweet @sportaUK #makeyrmove.

Other projects awarded funding this year include:
•Unity Leisure – This Girl Can Northampton activities will take place in parks and open spaces as this meets the objectives of the trusts key project partners. The project comprises mainly of a series of 8 week taster programmes with sustainable bespoke exit routes to support retaining the participants.
•Leisureworks – Love Your Life County Durham, expanding the LYL project into County Durham with the County Durham Community Diabetes Lifestyle Intervention Network.
•Magna Vitae – Lindsey Can, Lindsey Is – delivering a women’s focus project in East Lindsey, Lincolnshire for 19 to 35 year old females.
•Tees Active – Club 55+, socially based physical activity project across Stockton on Tees.
•Valley Leisure Ltd and Zumba Fitness LLC – Move More with Zumba. A new partnership across Test Valley for communities aged 50-70, delivering progressive Zumba-based activity sessions, using peer buddies for a community outreach and on site delivery approach.
•Life Leisure – actiLIFE is an accelerometer based project extending from their actiSPORT project. Recruiting inactive 35-55 year olds through workplaces and secondly through NHS health checks.
•Your Kent Leisure Ltd – Your Time to Move focuses on inactive men aged 30+ living in specific wards within Dover.
•Urban8, will use Tandridge Trust’s strengths in developing wider cultural activities alongside pure physical activity opportunities, to engage inactive young men aged 14-17. Through consultation with youth groups and community groups, dance and dodgeball featured strongly. UK Dodgeball are supporting with initiating sessions and a new league across Tandridge. Through new urban dance sessions the trust aim to set up a new male dance company, and offer dance styles such as skanking.
•Sporta Family Series is delivered in partnership with England Athletics locally and Great Run Local, and is being offered by five separate leisure trusts – Ashford Leisure Trust, BH Live, active Newham, Tempus Leisure, and Impulse Leisure with South Downs Leisure. The project will prepare participants to achieve, as a family, a 2km run by the end of the eight-week coaching block.
•Sheffield City Trust – Steel City Fit Club in partnership with Sheffield United FC Community Foundation and Sheffield Wednesday FC Community Foundation, to deliver activity recruiting through the clubs and the strength of their badge, players and legends.
•Active Northumberland – JobFit Hirst Welfare is an employability project that will use sport and employability support to engage inactive, unemployed adults aged 18-30 in Ashington.

Editor’s notes:

Sport England
Sport England is focused on helping people and communities across the country create a sporting habit for life. We will invest over £1 billion of National Lottery and Exchequer funding between 2012 and 2017 in organisations and projects that will:
•Help more people have a sporting habit for life
•Create more opportunities for young people to play sport
•Nurture and develop talent
•Provide the right facilities in the right places
•Support local authorities and unlock local funding
•Ensure real opportunities for communities.
The National Lottery has been changing lives for 18 years. Every week National Lottery players raise over £30 million to help change people’s lives across the UK.

sporta
sporta is the representative body for not for profit leisure and cultural trusts in the UK. sporta’s 125 plus member trusts have a combined annual turnover of in excess of £1.05 billion and manage more than 2400 sites on behalf of local authorities, which attract more than 250 million customer visits and employ almost 55,000 full time equivalent staff. www.sporta.org www.makeyourmoveuk.org

For further information contact:
Amy Andrew at Sport England
Tel: 0207 273 1593
Email: amy.andrew@sportengland.org

Abigail Harris at Big Fish Public Relations for sporta enquiries
Tel: 07738 331019
Email: abigail@bigfishpublicrelations.co.uk