Fresh look following a year of change for the Active Partnerships National Organisation

Andy Taylor, CEO of the Active Partnerships National Organisations, highlights recent changes for the team and the organisation.

Last summer we unveiled our new strategy and one year on I’m pleased to announce the launch of our new website.

This new site helps to provide further clarity on who we are as an organisation, the role we play with supporting the Active Partnerships network, clearly outlines our focus areas, and explains the specific work we do to help us deliver our mission of making active lives the norm for everyone in England, no matter where you live, as we know that this factor can still have a huge impact on how much you move.

The new website also uses our refreshed look for the Active Partnerships National Organisation and it’s the brand we use when we communicate as a collective network. We’ll be rolling this out over the next few weeks, the final piece in the jigsaw for the transformation that we’ve gone through in recent months.

It’s been a huge year for us as we have further developed our team in the last 12 months, strengthening the organisation in key areas as we have taken on the leadership of important new programmes of work.

For example, we’ve recruited to roles to co-ordinate and support the work of the new Sport Welfare Officers, an important network of around 60 officers, introduced to develop a new approach to assisting and supporting club welfare officers. We’ve also expanded our team working on the Multi-Sport Activity and Facilities Fund which will provide revenue and capital funding to deliver multi-sport activity and small-scale capital investment to communities across England.

Our support team has been strengthened too, as we’ve brought in specialists for business, finance, communications, events, and evaluation and learning, and existing team members have taken on new responsibilities such as in equity, equality, diversity and inclusion, and sustainability, ensuring that we fulfil our responsibilities in these crucial areas, while focusing on providing the best possible support to our network.

Our website also reveals more about how our network operates across different sectors, as we seek to work more closely with people and stakeholders including those within education and healthcare.

In particular, we are working collaboratively to integrate physical activity pathways into health and care systems, to help people of all ages, including those living with disabilities and long-term health conditions, to live well for longer and have a more active life. The Opening School Facilities programme, funded by the Department for Education, also sees us working with a consortium of partners to support schools to open up their facilities outside of the normal school day, so that pupils and the local community can be more active.

I’m proud of the team we’ve retained and recruited, and I know we now have even more to offer when it comes to connecting, strengthening and enabling the network of the 43 Active Partnerships across England, helping them to be more effective as they in turn look to support the communities that they are located within, breaking down the barriers to activity and ensuring that collectively we can help more people to move more.

This work with communities has become more important than ever in recent weeks and as a network we truly believe in the power of sport and physical activity to bring people together and we’ll be continuing to champion community cohesion and inclusion, working with amazing people from all backgrounds and all faiths.

You can read all about our team members on the new website and we’ll be welcoming more new recruits in the next few weeks but it’s not just the team that has evolved, we’ve had some changes to our board of trustees too, including four new board members joining us in the last few weeks.

We’ve announced that Dr Jeanelle de Gruchy, Deputy Chief Medical Officer and professional lead for the Office of Health Improvement and Disparities has joined our board and we’ve also added Andy Daly-Smith, Co-Director for the Centre for Applied Educational Research. We know we will benefit hugely from their expertise, advice and leadership.

The board has also been strengthened with the addition of two new ‘related’ members as Clare Morley and Vicky Joel, who are both CEOs within the Active Partnerships network, have joined us too. They will be sharing their extensive knowledge and insight from leading Active Partnerships in different areas of the country.

As we’ve been watching with admiration as the country’s elite sports men and women compete in the Olympics in Paris, and as we look forward to the Paralympics in just a few weeks’ time, we know that there will be people across the country that will be inspired to take up new sports and activities and as a network we’ll continue to play a key role in ensuring that these opportunities are available to everyone, tackling the inequalities that we know still exist and that can sometimes prevent women and girls, people with disabilities, those on lower incomes or people from diverse communities from being active.

But we don’t do this work alone, as always, we are grateful to work in partnership with some fantastic organisations. We value the strong relationship we’ve developed with our funders, Sport England, and the key organisations we work in partnership with on some of our programmes of work, but we are also very proud of the excellent relationships we have developed with many colleagues across the Active Partnerships network.

This network is full of people who are passionate about working with and empowering local communities and it’s a pleasure to provide the best support possible to help them fulfil this important role.