Building active regions for everyone

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) has become a key focus over the past two years at Active Oxfordshire.

Our work in this area has helped to transform physical activity and sport in the region, creating inclusive opportunities for people in most need to be active.

Thanks to these efforts we are now able to reach over 16,000 residents that are at highest risk of inactivity and we are seeing significant results.

For example, we know that in the 2023-24 period, 60% of participants on our Move Together adult programme with long-term health conditions increased their activity levels by the equivalent of 4,500 steps per day.

Making EDI everybody's business

Our main approach is fostering collective responsibility for EDI across the team by truly embedding its principles throughout the organisation.

To achieve this we offer integrated online EDI training from day one for all new team members, plus annual refreshers.

This is just one of a series of opportunities. Others are: 

• Monthly EDI meetings to discuss internal culture and ways to make physical activity more inclusive in our communities. These include a targeted, place-based approach to increasing activity levels in highest priority areas, ensuring that our programmes prioritise residents who are facing the biggest barriers to being active.
• Training sessions based on lived experiences to provide authentic insights into the barriers to physical activity in Oxfordshire. Our partner, MyVision Oxfordshire, offered a Visual Impairment Awareness session linked to physical activity and sport that was delivered by team members with lived experience of visual impairment.
• Inclusive communications assessing whether our messaging may unintentionally exclude people, making our language more accessible and working with local residents to shape our messaging. For example, as a team we made the decision to use the term Ethnically Diverse Communities rather than BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic). This move came from studying the research by Sporting Equals, which has lived experience at its heart. As well as this, based on feedback from local residents, we now also use the term ‘priority neighbourhoods’ rather than ‘areas of highest deprivation’.

It's also key that our chief executive and senior leadership team lead by example and we have also removed the EDI board champion role to emphasize that EDI is everyone’s responsibility, fostering collective ownership and integration of EDI work into all agendas.

To support these efforts, we’ve invested in resources – including a part-time EDI role – and introduced recruitment principles that strengthen both our hiring processes and team culture.

Using lived experience to drive change

On top of these measures, we are also in the process of co-developing a lived experience engagement policy to support individuals and communities facing barriers to physical activity by listening to their challenges and using their input to drive meaningful change.

This will be available in early 2025, so watch this space!

Our data was also showing that men were less likely to engage in the Move Together pathway so we decided to hold male focus groups to better understand how we can adapt the programme to make it more accessible to this audience.

We've also edited some marketing materials to make them more relevant to men, plus we are monitoring data to assess their impact.

Transforming inclusion in the sport and activity sector

Our EDI initiatives are already making a difference across various programmes in Oxfordshire. Some of them are:

• embedding disability inclusion training in the Young Leaders Programme to enhance future coaches' understanding of the topic
• delivering inclusivity training to 54 participants from 21 organisations, helping young people with additional needs engage in physical activity
• working closely with clubs such as Gosford All Blacks – who launched Oxfordshire’s first Inclusive Rugby Network to make rugby more accessible – and Barton United, who helped five girls to complete their football refereeing qualifications in the 2023-2024 period
• we work with a group of volunteer active ambassadors, who have lived experience of facing barriers to activity and help to develop and shape our work. An example of this is Natasha, a resident from one of our highest priority areas who now works for our team two days a week on our Active Neighbourhood community funding programme
• one of our biggest flagship activity programmes for families on low incomes – known as You Move – now has in excess of 10,000 residents engaged, compared to 6,208 residents in the 2022-2023 period. As a result of our focus on EDI and partnerships working across Oxfordshire, 28% of participants are from a background other than White British and 25% have a disability.

Learning from the community 

We're very proud of the results of our EDI efforts and that these extend beyond Active Oxfordshire, plus we’ve also taken steps to learn from others while sharing our insights, such as:

• convening an EDI peer-to-peer group to bring local organisations together to discuss EDI topics and share ideas every two/three months
• collaborating with partners to develop an Inclusive Communications Toolkit for wider use across the county. This will be updated in early 2025.

We understand that our EDI journey is ongoing, and we remain committed to evolving and working with others to share learnings and strive towards a truly inclusive world where everybody – regardless of their background or ability – is able to enjoy the many benefits of being active.

If you’d like to share insights or ask questions, please get in touch.