Blog: 'Inclusivity and accessibility is central to all our CSP team's work'
The English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS) website features a blog post every Friday through the year.
March's theme is local sports delivery. This week, the final in the series, Paul Kreczak of Tees Valley Sport discusses striking gold in the hunt for local sport provision for disabled people.
Paul’s blog:
I’m Paul Kreczak and I work as a Project Officer for Tees Valley Sport, a County Sports Partnership (CSP) in the North East of England.
My role is incredibly varied and includes the management of the Satellite Clubs programme locally, the coordination of local StreetGames projects, working on Tees Valley Sport’s Safeguarding priorities and leading on disability sport for the CSP.
When I joined the organisation over 10 years ago we had dedicated Disability Officer working full-time who worked with equivalents from Local Authority Sports Development teams and developed events, participation programmes and support for local clubs and groups.
There was lots going on and it seemed that disability sport was booming.
However, changes in funding meant that suddenly there was no dedicated officer within our team and local Sports Development teams were changing too and reducing in size.
Inevitably, this meant a reduction in capacity and all of a sudden this raft of disability work had seemingly disappeared.
Disability sport has always been high priority for Tees Valley Sport and is championed by our Executive Director Jean Lordon, who insisted that a change in funding simply meant that we had to find a new way to support disability sports provision in the Tees Valley.
It became clear very quickly that without a dedicated Officer, disability sport was now everybody’s responsibility.
With this mind-set, inclusivity and accessibility became central to the work of all of the CSP team and was embedded in all programmes. This was very positive, but Jean still felt that we needed a member of staff who could coordinate the work. And that member of staff is me.
The first thing I was keen to do was to get some support and, with the help of Tom Webster at the English Federation of Disability Sport, I developed a Disability Sports Forum made up of a wide variety of partners who were working, playing, volunteering or who simply had an interest in developing disability sport locally.
The second thing I wanted to do was to find out what was actually happening in the Tees Valley, so the Forum conducted an extensive review of current provision.
"Many different partners are delivering excellent work"
We discovered, to our pleasant surprise, that there was a great deal going on. The activity that I thought had stopped because of the changes in funding had simply continued as normal, under the radar, through the hard work of dedicated volunteers. There was lots happening and many different partners were delivering excellent work, but each in isolation.
It was then decided that the main remit of the Tees Valley Disability Sports Forum would be to coordinate this provision, to ensure people were aware of what was happening locally, linking people and projects to enhance the offers and make the most of funding, to avoid duplication and to identify any gaps in provision.
With the help of partners, the Forum developed a disability sports plan to manage this remit. But, keen that the group did not become just a ‘talking shop’, the plan included some areas of delivery based around two key priorities:
- Increasing participation of disabled people in sport/physical activity.
- Developing more disabled leaders/coaches.
A simple application process was developed which invited expressions of interest from organisations and clubs who wanted to develop a project that focused on one of these key priorities. We purposefully kept the criteria as broad as possible as we were keen to see a range of projects involving different activities and ages.
The response was very encouraging and we have since funded five very distinct new projects - two focused on developing leadership and three on increasing participation.
The funding has been really valuable for the organisations involved and allowed them to develop capacity as well as getting more disabled people playing a variety of sports. It has also resulted in more organisations wanting to get involved in the Forum, which can only be a positive thing.
We have an open policy where anybody is able to attend the meetings and we are constantly discovering new groups who are doing amazing work in local communities and our network is growing.
Using insight from the CSP and the local knowledge of partners, the Forum is now able to identify the needs of the local community and respond by linking them with opportunities and appropriate local groups.
The Forum is keen to develop, and now looking into co-ordinated funding bids to support future plans. We may not have a dedicated Officer anymore but it turns out that this ‘new way of working’ is, well, working!
