Get Healthy Get into Sport

Problem

Poverty and low income are significant determinants of participation (and interest) in sport. Poverty and low income is associated with multiple adverse effects on individuals and its undermining effects can be barriers to engaging people in sport and other physical activity.

Solution

Discover and Define

This project used the learning from previous initiatives, to develop the Get Healthy Get into Sport approaches. The key insights used included:

• people who are most inactive and from areas of high deprivation require more personalised buddying support.
• A less restrictive, more open approach to physical activity and sport is important to enable the project to respond to user preference.
• Evidence from local programmes suggests that approximately six 1:1 mentoring sessions is the minimum amount to support those with the greatest need with a high willingness to change, to overcome barriers to participation through additional personalised support. This is flexible depending on the individual’s needs though.
• low or no cost activities, reductions in costs to access local leisure facilities, including family and friends in the offer and providing a wide range of activities and incentives all help engage people this target group.
• The involvement of families and friends within the sessions is fundamental to engaging the most inactive. By involving people close to those participating, a support network is created that can help keep motivation and participation rates high.
• Empowering people to be involved in the design and development of local projects through local steering groups is a successful approach to supporting individuals and communities to continue with behaviour change in the longer term.

Develop and Deliver

Understanding the attitudes, perceptions and behaviours of the people that the project is targeting is key to appropriately using behaviour change techniques that can help to remove barriers and aid motivation.

For example, when developing a specific activity session the project team recognised the role of community boundaries on participation. Although there was a high quality local leisure facility within a 20 minute walk of where the community lived, those consulted did not perceive it as being for them. It was outside of where they considered their community boundaries to be and was not somewhere they were likely to visit.

The project group identify a local community as a facility were people felt comfortable. The project co-ordinator developed a partnership between the local leisure centre staff and the community centre to develop an outreach activity session within the Greenhill Community boundaries.

Impact

The session has been running for more than 18 months and regularly has 10-12 people taking part.

Once people have felt more comfortable with being active, the instructors and mentors have been able to stretch their community boundaries to include the local leisure facility and other sporting offers further afield, such as parkruns and Santa Runs. Initially, this is often with the project’s mentors providing dedicated support by organising transport and going to activities with them.

• Preliminary results suggest that participants tend to be more active after three and six months relative to baseline.
• The physical activities participants try during the sessions with their mentor seem to impact on the types of physical activities they choose to do once the mentoring sessions have finished.
• Overall, participants reported enjoying the one-to-one mentoring sessions, and some indicated they would not have started to do sport or physical activity without these sessions.

Read more: Active Together - Get Healthy Get Into Sport (active-together.org)