What is Active Through Stoke on Trent?
Active Through Stoke is a new & exciting project being delivered in our communities. It is centred around providing free or low-cost physical activity opportunities and giving participants ownership over their sessions.
Following a successful funding application with Sport England & Football Foundation, Stoke will be able to support communities get active over the next 5 years. This is your opportunity to get active and learn new things in a fun and different way.
If you are in Burslem or Blurton, these activities will be on your doorstep! Perfect for all abilities, allowing you to try new ways to get active and potentially gaining some new skills along the way.
There is a variety of sessions available, including; fitness classes, walking football, indoor curling, mindfulness and lots more – we hope to see you there soon!
What is Active Through Football?
Active Through Football is our opportunity to learn from doing things differently. By identifying and working with key target audiences, who face some of the greatest inequalities to being physically active, we want to increase activity levels and create sustained behaviour change using a ‘Place-based approach.’
The programme brings key local stakeholders together as a consortium to create and deliver a plan for their local area or ‘Place’. The plans will be based predominately on activating key settings through the delivery of recreational and informal small-sided football activity and developed through community engagement.
What we’re trying to achieve?
Active Through Stoke on Trent will bring together the local community & local organisations to create & deliver a plan that is right for the identified wards in the city. In the initial phase this will be Blurton & Burslem as identified during the initial consultation.
Insight
Increased understanding of opportunities/barriers for target audience to play football, through community engagement
Community Ownership
Increased involvement of target audience in design and delivery of activities through ongoing community engagement.
Increased Activity
Increased activity levels in people aged 16+ from target audience through football.
Behaviour Change
Target audience sustain improved long-term physical activity habits through behaviour change.
Working Together
For the biggest impact to be achieved, we know that collaboration is key & doesn’t just sit with one organisation!
A range of organisations & community groups from across Stoke on Trent & Staffordshire will work in partnership to share learnings & experience of the people and local community of the wards identified.
Engaging The Community
Community engagement has been placed at the heart of this project and will be used to inform decisions moving forwards. The best community projects are designed and delivered in partnership with the community, and we want to ensure that the local community feel included & valued so that they want to take part in activities and use the facilities available to them. We want to build relationships and trust by listening & talking to people to understand their needs throughout the duration of the project.
Place-Based Approach
The Active Through Stoke on Trent project in the initial phase will be focusing on 2 specific wards in the City, which will be Burslem & Blurton.
The project will be in communities, and organisations within them, where the inequalities specific to that area can be best understood, and where the best prospects of tackling them lie. The focus will be to work within the community to activate a range of key settings, through the delivery of recreational activities that provide opportunities to the community to increase physical activity levels and sustained behaviour change long term.
Long term, the plan will be to support the development of a local workforce so communities can take on the delivery of activities to support long term sustainability.
