Collaboration and Acceleration

This week was about collaboration and acceleration.

At Participate World, we’re constantly looking for ways to explore opportunities for community sport collaboration in the UK and around the world, and to raise awareness of the aggregate value of its amazing impact.

With that in mind, thank you to Dr Ben Farai Sanders, the Executive Director of the International Platform on Sport and Development for exploring synergies between the bit of our work that helps nurture a collective of community sport leaders and the sportanddev website, with its international reach of contacts and resources that promote sport and development.

Similarly, thank you to Ricky Boardman, Head of Research and Development at the Sport and Recreation Alliance for talking me through their wealth of impact assessment and political advocacy work, that proves and pushes for the benefit of participation in community sport.

Loads to reflect on from Ben and Ricky, some of which we brought into this week’s Working Group on Collaboration in Community Sport, that we set up to realise the Leeds Declaration on Community Sport for Development and Diplomacy.

At that working group, we discussed how to share learning across the ‘community sport collective’, like a brilliant piece on volunteer recruitment by Linda Cairns (https://lnkd.in/e4a559J8). We mused over plans for another Summit with a focus on exploring common issues in community sport through practitioner led workshops. And excitingly, how to maintain a rebellious nature in our work that allows for a sense of discovery as we work together.

Elsewhere this week, Tom Williams and I cracked on with developing the ‘Accelerator’ programme, which will help nurture incredible community sport organisations that have ambition and potential to scale. We are building on the workshop kindly hosted by Accenture earlier this year (thank you Louise James (Mackeson-Sandbach)) and taken further inspiration from colleagues in organisations as diverse as community running to Formula One (thank you to all those who offered their time and thoughts this week), to create what we think will be a unique offer to support even more impact through community sport, whilst helping to shape the next generation of community sport leaders. More to follow!