Key learning from the Birmingham and Solihull Local Delivery Pilot programme
Through National Lottery investment, Sport England funded 12 ‘local delivery pilot’ areas between 2018-2024, to test innovative place-based approaches and find solutions to deliver sustainable increases in activity levels across the country. Sport England’s investment was founded on a commitment to address stubborn inequalities that exist within our communities and demonstrate how sport and physical activity can shape local policy and help drive long-lasting, transformational whole-system change.
The Active Communities programme was the local delivery pilot for Birmingham and Solihull, a collaboration between Birmingham City Council and Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, led by The Active Wellbeing Society. Alongside a range of local partner organisations across the two local authority areas, we worked with the most marginalised communities across six key areas, to remove the barriers to physical and civic activity and co-create solutions to improve activity.
From its outset, the programme understood that things needed to be done differently because ‘we can’t do what we’ve always done’. The programme has supported individuals and communities in their journey to physical activity, focusing on a range of factors that contribute to poor socio-economic outcomes including overall poverty, food poverty and access to healthy food, lack of social connections, mental health and wellbeing challenges, and environmental factors. The funding directly supported the delivery of 15,067 physical and social sessions and events, with 173,609 attendances.
The story and learning of Active Communities has been collated into the artefact linked below. This captures our collective journey in the hope of encouraging place-leaders to step into the uncomfortable place of not knowing, as this is where real change is going to come from. This includes approaches and foundational practices of systems change we have found are critical to the fundamental shift that is needed to change systems, if sport and physical activity is to play a bigger role in addressing health inequalities.
