Harakati

Before we settled on Participate World, Tom Williams and I bounced around a few organisation names including ‘Harakati’ which is Swahili for movement. It spoke to Tom’s roots in East Africa as well as the relationship between physical and social movement, in that community sport can drive community health, cohesion and development.

In a twist of fate, this week had a health and social wellbeing theme bookended with exploring community sport practice and opportunities to partner in Kenya.

Thank you to Jason Brannan for hosting us at the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, where we also met with Ollie Hart, Clinical Director at Peak Health Coaching, and Dr Marlize De Vivo from the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine in Sheffield. It was a real privilege to hear about their cutting edge applied research and practice in order to better understand how we can ensure that community sport best delivers health and wellbeing outcomes. We very much look forward to welcoming Marlize and Ollie to the Leeds Summit in September.

Thank you as well to Paul Newman, CEO at the Derby County Community Trust, for his time to talk through their work in Kenya. There’s clearly so much potential to learn from how football club foundations work in the UK and to explore potential to partner with communities overseas. Again, something to explore in more detail at the Leeds Summit.

A final thanks to Hywel George at Griot who travelled from South Wales to Yorkshire to talk through their work with Kenyan communities to promote environmental sustainability, and how community sport could support their work.

I look forward to picking up these Harakati threads when I return from leave in a couple of weeks.