Young Leaders experience working with Get Berkshire Active

Get Berkshire Active is one of a network of forty-three Active Partnerships (APs) across England, it is a charity with the purpose of changing lives through Sport and Physical activity. Alongside seven APs, Get Berkshire Active is rolling out Project 500 – a regional initiative across South East of England which campaigns to address the imbalance in the number of male to female coaches, as well as support, educate and encourage women into sports coaching and those who are already within the landscape.

What we did

In order to promote Project 500 and reach out to the Berkshire community, Get Berkshire Active wanted support in carrying out research to identify barriers for females in sport coaching and in creating four social media posts inline with their key pillars – inclusion, diversity, body confidence and mental health – helping to share the key messages for the project and connect with the community.

The Young Leaders team began with conducting secondary research to identify the barriers females faced within the space, gain a better understanding of the impact of Project 500 and start gathering content for the social media posts. This phase focused on looking at research papers, podcasts, first-hand accounts of women in sport sharing their experiences, articles and several forms of media. The second phase consisted of the team working on drafting the social media posts, the team included a graphic artist and illustrator, both of who worked on the posts and designed art that reflected the barriers. The Young Leaders came up with four social media posts accompanied with graphics which could be used by Get Berkshire Active for the Project 500 initiative.

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Concept Development work by Young Leader Jasmine Hassan

Lessons learnt

Whilst there was positive feedback with the project, there were several key lessons learnt and skills developed by the Young Leaders. One of the biggest lessons learnt by a member of the team was that constant communication when building a collective project between two organisations is key. The digital age makes things easier, but a brief, guides and result isn’t the full story of a project – it’s the communication in between that can have a greater impact than any deliverable and makes partnerships so much stronger.