Well Doncaster and Get Doncaster Moving working together – because it makes sense!
Hello! My name’s Jodie Bridger and I’m the Programme Manager for Doncaster’s ‘Local Delivery Pilot’, which is supporting ambitions to ‘Get Doncaster Moving’. Doncaster is one of twelve pilot areas, selected to work with Sport England to build healthier and more active communities. The pilot will try new ways of doing things, to shift stubborn inequalities in participation.
The number of people in Doncaster who move enough to benefit their health and wellbeing remains persistently low compared to other areas of the country. There are also inequalities across Doncaster; where in certain communities, inactivity levels are almost double the Doncaster average. These inequalities in participation mirror the health, social and economic inequalities across Doncaster as a whole; meaning that we need to think more broadly than providing structured physical activity and sport and hoping that people turn up.
The approach for Get Doncaster Moving and the Local Delivery Pilot focuses on physical activity fitting within the daily lives of people within their communities. Most importantly for me, it focuses resources on changes that will have a long lasting, sustainable impact on improving the conditions for people in Doncaster to be physically active. We want to make it the ‘normal’ thing to do. The vision of Get Doncaster Moving (and my own belief), is that by getting people moving more within their normal routines (not necessarily sport or structured activity) can have a huge positive impact on the health, wellbeing and vibrancy of a community and place.
Get Doncaster Moving and Well Doncaster share the same ambitions and Asset-Based principles of building on ‘what’s strong, not what’swrong’. That’s why it makes sense for us to work together. Our approach takes inspiration from Cormac Russell and his colleagues at Nurture Development, which frames community development as something that is done ‘with’ and ‘by’ a community, rather than ‘to’ or ‘for’ people. We have learned a lot from Well Denaby, and through the links with Yorkshire Sport Foundation’s ‘Active Dearne’ project, which is also designed with Asset Based Community Development at its heart.
So far, we have worked with the Behavioural Science Consortium to understand more about inactivity across different communities in Doncaster, combining the COM-B behaviour change model with Appreciative Inquiry. COM-B considers how capability, opportunity and motivation all have a role to play in determining behaviour; and Appreciative Inquiry is an approach to problem solving that focuses on strengths rather than weaknesses. There were three phases; 1) household surveys 2) training volunteers to have conversations in their communities 3) workshops for the community to develop ideas about tackling inactivity in their place.
You can read more about the research and findings in the Get Doncaster Moving Document Library. The insight so far has told us that each community has different levels of capability, opportunity and motivations to be active, and the solutions that communities are starting to develop are all different. The process and findings so far are a starting point for the new Well Doncaster Officers to continue the work with communities. I’m really looking forward to working with them and the communities to develop solutions that are led and sustained by people in the community.
Look out for more post as the programme develops