What is Community Sport?
Early last year, when Chris Lomax MBE and I embarked on this journey, our ambition was to support the many great community sport practitioners around the world.
We felt that by combining our own learnings from almost two decades across parkrun and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, we could add value to organisations looking to create impact at scale.
On thing that keeps coming up in conversation however, is what do we mean when we say community sport? Particularly the sport bit.
Which is a great question actually.
Perhaps we need a new term to describe what we mean?
For example, earlier this week I spent some time online with Mark Burns and the team at The Man Walk Australia Incorporated, an incredible Australian-based movement that looks to positively impact men’s mental health.
What the Man Walk has achieved so far is incredible (and hugely inspirational) and it’s genuinely a massive honour to be part of their journey, but is it community sport?
It’s definitely community, and definitely movement, and race walking is definitely a sport, but I don’t think this is sport.
My thoughts then go to great charities like GoodGym (a community of people who combine running, walking and cycling with helping communities) or stormbreak CIO (who aim to improve children’s mental health through movement), neither of whom neatly fall into the sport category.
I guess the things that define all of the brilliant organisations we aim to support, champion, and celebrate, is that they all look to do two key things …
1. Get people moving
2. Get people together
Perhaps, I’m overthinking it.
And perhaps community sport is in fact a great catch-all term?
Or perhaps we need a new definition?
Let me know your thoughts.
Anyway, finally, thanks to Lisa Moseley and the Yorkshire Sport Foundation for the invitation to their conference in Leeds on Thursday. Chris went along as our Participate World representative, and found it to be a great opportunity to explore how sport is bringing communities closer together, across Yorkshire, with inspiring stories from organisations like Beeston-based Champions Community Sports and Health.
It was also great to hear from representatives of UK and regional government, including from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, that community sport practitioners are both policy implementers and developers when it comes to creating social good.
We’ll keep doing our bit to help advocate for the collective impact of more and more organisations, who together, creative massive social benefit.
Have a great weekend, and I hope you get the opportunity to get together and get moving.
📸 This week’s photo is from October last year, when me, my Dad, and Aston went to watch Lausanne FC against Basel. A great day out, watching sport and we did walk around the stadium, and Aston entered a keep-up competition. Does that all count as community sport?
