There’s a fundamental ambition through all of our legacy planning that I wanted to hone-in on here.
That is to focus resource on where it’s most needed and can have the biggest impact.
That means an unrelating commitment to ensuring the funding reaches deeper and wider than it has in the past.
All of our resource is through the lens of tackling inequalities, supporting those that have the most to gain but often the hardest journey to find sporting opportunities that are affordable, accessible and responsive to where people find themselves.
We won’t always get this right and we are on a journey rather than arriving at the end at this point and have much to learn.
Record breaking
Team England's tally of 176 medals - including 57 gold - is their best ever haul from a home Games.
But we’re keen to challenge ourselves, and the partners we’re working through, to continually ask if we’re listening deeply to what communities are saying? Are we co-creating with and not doing to? Are we recognising and building on the assets in place, particularly the passion, lived experience and knowledge to know what is best?
We’ve seen some of the NGBs we’re working with, seeking to collaborate with local partners and stakeholders and with a passion to do things differently to create new sustainable opportunities and make existing opportunities more accessible.
Ultimately if we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always got.
The Games is a catalyst to do things differently and embed a new way of supporting people to access the benefits of an active lifestyle, but in a way that works for them on their terms as opposed to being offered short-term, top-down approaches that don’t have the ownership to be sustained.
We’ve learnt this from the last four years of our place-based working across the organisation and now have an opportunity to embed that learning through our approach to legacy.
Our investment over the next 18 months should create the foundations for how we want to work locally and with partners in Birmingham and the West Midlands in the future.
There are lots of partners and stakeholders that have fabulous energy, commitment, knowledge and influence, and we want to work with you to realise the benefits that sport and physical activity can have.
If we can harness the collective ambition through a shared sense of purpose and with an unrelenting commitment to making a difference, we can deliver on our Uniting the Movement ambition to get more people to move more and all the benefits that brings.
