No community sport monopoly
I always thought that I was pretty good at Monopoly. Not quite seeing it as a core personality trait but not far off…
After being thrashed at it on Wednesday morning by a friend’s daughter, I actually came away feeling quite positive. The game was fun, I learned a lot about not splurging all my money on the first couple of turns and the other player seemed buoyed by the whole thing.
There’s probably some learning in there about the fluidity and complexity of personal motivation, especially in relation to the lived experience of others. Or perhaps a simple wake-up call not to rest on my Monopoly laurels.
Either way, it was a precursor to a cracking half day workshop that we ran with Mel Bound from This Woman Runs, kindly hosted by Chrissie Wellington.
Mel has grown an amazing digital and in-person community initiative from one event in Bristol in 2014 to weekly social runs across the UK. We hope to work with Mel as she continues to scale the size and impact of her organisation, providing insights from Tom’s professional experience whilst linking her to the evolving peer group that we are creating. We’re also hugely grateful to Mel for her insights into how we can hone the support we provide to organisations such as This Woman Runs.
More broadly, as part of our efforts to best understand the current challenges and opportunities faced by community sport and physical activity providers, Tom spent time on Thursday with Tristan Batley-Kyle from Run For All, Cathi Farrer-Mitchell from Park Yoga, and Rick Jenner from ParkPlay.
Our peer-to-peer network is starting to take shape and we will prioritise its development over the next few weeks. This practitioner-centric community will help organisations like those above share ideas, positively challenge each other and amplify not only their impact but also their calls for better political understanding, support and funding. A ‘brainstrust’ and advocacy group combined.
On that latter point, it was also great to meet this week with Simon Lansley who founded ConnectSport to see how we can work together to showcase great community sport in the UK and around the world.
Perhaps some sort of community sport based board game might be an idea…
