UK Soft Power meets Urban Running

Tom Williams and I were back at the Foreign Office this week attending the UK Government’s Working Group on Sports Diplomacy. Alongside senior representatives from some of the biggest organisations in professional sport, as well as Dame Katherine Grainger and Dame Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson from the UK Soft Power Council, it was great that community sport had its place at the table.

We advocated for the UK Soft Power Strategy to recognise community sport specifically as an incredible UK diplomatic and development USP, that can build international partnerships to bring communities together for social good. Imagine the impact of twinning Brighton Table Tennis Club with Brighton Jamaica. Of partnering This Woman Runs with women’s groups around the world. Or what would Made Running’s Monday Night Run Club in Manchester look like in other cities around the world? The list goes on…

But clearly the UK community sport ecosphere must itself be fully recognised, celebrated and supported to maximise its impact at home and overseas. On Thursday, we spent time with colleagues from Leeds University and Sport Leeds to explore further how to position Leeds as a centre of gravity for this. We would love to create a practitioner-led global centre of excellence for community sport development and diplomacy, creating a more cohesive, self-supporting and visible community sport landscape, underpinned by structured learning for and by practitioners.

We also met up with Rowan Ardill from Burnley FC in the Community to understand their work, their challenges and priorities. It prompted us to think how we might help link football foundations with other community organisations and whether structured learning programmes, developed with UK academic institutions, could help improve impact. It was also great to see how Burnley in the Community supports the local food bank, reminding me of the relationship between community sport and social support that we also saw in Brighton. We discussed this and more with Lynsey Barraclough from Harrogate Town AFC Community Foundation to see what is possible on our doorstep.

After Burnley, we headed to Made Running to spend time with Hermen Dange and to participate (of course) in his Monday night 5k run alongside hundreds of others through central Manchester. His message around tolerance, inclusion and empowerment is all the more authentic given his own journey. His website is brilliant.

For all that, my biggest highlight this week was running with my 16 year old daughter for the first time. She also hadn’t run for nearly three years. Over 30 minutes or so, we put the world to rights from the pressures of GSCEs to what colour to paint our front door. It was brilliant and I look forward to doing it again this week and I hope the week after, and the week after that.

Community really does start at home and is powerfully personal.