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Place partnerships

In order to focus our investment and resources on the communities that need it most, we’re significantly increasing the number of places across England that we partner with.

Place partnerships are instrumental in our ability to create the conditions for change at a local level and help people to be physically active.

Our Uniting the Movement strategy has made a bold commitment to work in areas of greatest need to tackle inactivity levels and the associated inequalities that compound stubborn trends.

Taking our learning from the 12 local delivery pilots (LDPs) and other place-based work, we're expanding our approach and investing up to £190 million of National Lottery and Exchequer funding into more than 80 new places across England.

And a further £60 million will also be invested - £35m of which will be used to strengthen existing work with our current place partnersips, while £25m will go towards ensuring every area of England receives support through our Place Universal Offer.

We've collated and discussed our learning so far in our Place Change Makers podcast series and resources. These focus on the importance of the people who are helping us support the communities that need it most.

Cut-outs of people underneath speech bubbles with the text 'Place Change Makers' and the Sport England logo

Our place-based systemic work will see us work across England through our existing 12 Place Partnerships (formerly LDPs) and network of 43 Active Partnerships, to foster relationships with local organisations and leaders to overcome the specific barriers to physical activity that exist in their communities.

We’re targeting the greatest resource to areas with highest inactivity levels and other social need indicators, as this is where this commitment can have the biggest impact on our key outcomes.

And we’re using a range of data sources to inform this approach, including physical activity data from our Active Lives Surveys, as well as wider social data including the index of multiple deprivation (IMD), community need and health inequalities data.

A further explanation of our analysis can be found in our 'Identifying priority places' guide below.

Since launching our place-based investment in November 2023, we've started working with 53 new places right across England, from Swindon to Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool to Brent and Walsall to West Norfolk. 

Alongside our local Active Partnerships, we've been partnering with key stakeholders in each of these places to establish what the local ambition and approach will be.  

Partners from local government, health, community voluntary sector, transport, housing and some national agencies are coming together to focus on physical activity. 

There's been positivity from these stakeholders about the approach we've chosen to take, which is from the ground up and rooted in the needs of their communities.

We've also started to make key investments into a number of these first phase places, with many more proposals for funding in the pipeline. 

We're now working towards our second phase of place expansion – taking us up to 80 places in total.

We're currently working alongside our partners to work out where we need to partner next, so we continue to grow this approach with pace and impact. 
 

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