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I have worked for Active Oxfordshire for 8 years now, and been CEO for just over 2. I was fortunate growing up being active and with sport a part of my life - only realising the benefits and how lucky I was in adulthood. I now want to make sure those benefits are available to all and particularly those with fewer or no opportunities to engage.
Active Oxfordshire existed since 2004 in different iterations. In 2018 it became a charity and has moved more towards a community assets and place based approach. We receive core funding from Sport England, and the move to being a charity enables us to have a much clearer purpose around addressing inequalities.
Prior to that we were not adding as much value at a system level as we could, and were sometimes inadvertently seen as a competitor with partner organisations. We now have a clear niche and purposes in the system.
Our vision is for a transformed Oxfordshire where equal access to physical activity has radically improved the health and wellbeing of communities. We build community wealth by helping partners and community providers find ways to offer better, more accessible provision to the less well served. We want to unify partners, challenge unhelpful norms and call out inequalities in a way that empowers communities to take action. I would like to see a more even power dynamic between funders/commissioners and the communities they serve.
Our intended beneficiaries are people who have significantly reduced opportunities for physical activity. They are often people with less income who face multiple other disadvantages. Large swathes of our community are not getting access to essential physical activity.
Sport England provides a level of core funding (33% of our income) and we work closely with the local integrated care board and Public Health as well as city and district councils and other charities.
Our collaborating partners are the statutory organisations -in both tiers of local government. In addition, these days we have much more emphasis on our relationships with community groups. We have deliberately gone to and built relationships with those groups who have rapport with their community, and offered them the tools of sport and activity. Power sharing is important. What they can do is something that we cannot do.
In our experience, this is much more effective than going to a traditional sports provider and trying to help them develop rapport with their communities as that relies on a level of existing trust and a long term commitment. Time is something that some providers simply do not have as they are volunteer led. We do work with sport providers to address this as we need the whole system working effectively but in parallel we work through and with community organisations.
One example is Oxford Community Action. We have moved from giving them multiple smaller grants for mini projects to a longer term view of a partnership. This enables the leadership at OCA to take a different approach with us. We are a trusted partner, in it for the long haul - not putting them in a position where we are a system that needs to be ‘gamed’ for a short term solution. It enables them to create the building blocks of something that will last. They trained up a number of people as cycle instructors for example, so they won’t need us in an ongoing way. They will be ambitious for something new for their communities. We will be allies when things get tough and honest when mistakes are made.
Another example is the Windrush bike project. We have funded them a substantial sum of money over the years for the Wheels for All project - which now runs week in and week out. We have helped them with around £40K grant for restarting this crucial service. Now they are very able to draw in their own funding and investment.
We have the capacity to do live evaluation. Using GP data - and measure the reduction in GP appointments by those that have participated in some of our programmes. So that is real economic saving for the NHS. No one gets a refund, but it does mean a real burden and capacity reduction on primary care allowing money to be spent elsewhere.
The things that have helped include the way we are commissioned by Sport England which is so different now, with few prescribed KPI’s and trust in us to make good decisions with our local partners to tackle inequalities. I attended a system changers programme with Oxford Hub and Lankelly Chase funders. It was a pivotal moment in my thinking and I also developed relationships in Blackbird Leys. It opened my eyes to the area and I got to spend a lot of time getting to know local people.
The Marmalade collective also provided a space which is quite rare - bringing people together in Oxford with disparate points of view together. It opened my eyes to different ways of working from around the country and beyond. I started to understand meaningful measurement and what power sharing looks like in practise.
Finance
There are many enabling organisations distributing funding in small pots. Is there a need to have all of these ‘middle men’? It would be much more efficient if we were able to pool our resources in terms of funding; that would help groups in Oxfordshire that are funded year by year but currently have to apply for lots of small grants. At the moment a community group might get £50,000 per year as 10 x £5,000 grants from different organisations rather than bigger lumps which would be more efficient and enable longer term planning and stability. A lot of energy is wasted in multiple applications and reporting relationships.
Risk
I would love to see a reframing of risk. It would have a massive impact on everything else we do. We overstate risk - the likelihood of negatives and severity. We are already failing - letting people down and leaving people out of physical activity. We know the current system is not working for those who need it to work. It's failing many. So why would we not try something different and take more risks? The biggest risk is doing more of the same as we know with certainty that it hasn’t worked historically.
Accountability
We should also put accountability in the right places. Who needs to hold the accountability? Can the bigger organisations stomach that accountability without passing it down the chain to cover ourselves? Too much unnecessary accountability at grassroots smothers action. We are putting wasted time in their way and it costs the institutions a lot to administer and monitor. We should untether community groups from taking on risk for bigger institutions - giving them a greater degree of power and decision making so they get to do more of what they are good at - looking after neighbours and making places where we live healthier and happier.
Prevention is everything: how can we shift the prevention budget in Oxfordshire from 0.1% to 1% of the total spend? That would allow us to build genuine wealth in the community , creating time, resources, money and knowledge and saving the NHS millions.
This case study is part of the 'Community wealth building: big conversations' project. These case studies are in the voice of the people who gave them. They seek to honestly present their successes, as well as the challenges of trying to build a more just, sustainable economy and community. We encourage conversation - so if you want to get in touch and talk more to any of the groups, please do.
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