Mental Health Awareness Week this year has a theme around ‘community’. As the Mental Health Foundation states, “Being part of a safe, positive community is vital for our mental health and wellbeing. We thrive when we have strong connections with other people and supportive communities that remind us, we are not alone. Communities can provide a sense of belonging, safety, support in hard times, and give us a sense purpose.”
Here at Rise, we are in the process of refreshing our strategy, and the concept of community has come up in our discussions several times as being potentially a key focus for the next period of our delivery.
Physical activity, movement and sport have a strong role to play in bringing people together, helping to create identity and developing individual and collective confidence and skills. Sport can be a strong force for good and help to make places great in a wide range of ways, including creating jobs and volunteering opportunities, tackling anti-social behaviour and connecting neighbourhoods.
Speaking from my own personal experience, the community that is formed at a cricket club close to where my parents live has been vital to ensuring that my dad, whose playing days are long gone and who has been cruelly affected by Parkinson’s, is able to continue to be around and connect with like-minded people, and feel welcomed and at home – to continue to feel a sense of belonging. In the winter months, when the cricket is packed up for another season and spectating from the clubhouse steps is a distant memory, that loss of community undoubtedly negatively impacts his wellbeing.
We can help you support your community
As Rise, our team has worked tirelessly over the last couple of years to deliver nearly £3m of funding to schools in our region to open their sports facilities outside of curriculum time to help cement those facilities as true community assets. In that time, there have been hundreds of thousands of visits for sport and physical activity at these schools – highlighting the interconnected nature of sport and community and helping to drive improvements in mental wellbeing in the process, both for pupils and for the wider community.
We’re also really excited about new programmes of work that we are either leading or supporting across the region that focus on taking a place-based approach to supporting communities to be more physically active for the all the many and various benefits that brings. In parts of Durham, Gateshead and South Tyneside, we are working with system partners to support communities in an asset-based way, and we are working with several other local authorities in the North East to bring investment into their areas which will enable similar work to also take place in some of their communities.
Strong communities improve resilience
Last summer, when our sense of community may have been shattered following riots in Sunderland, we actually saw an amazing response from the vast majority of the local community who wanted to show that those who took to the streets in violent disorder were not representative of the city. References to sport and our sporting heritage came out strongly in this amazing poem from Sunderland College students, and Sunderland AFC were also quick to condemn the actions of the minority who sought to damage the community.
This positive fusion of culture, sport and heritage went a long way towards positively impacting the wellbeing of those targeted by the riots, and whilst we hope that we do not see similar scenes again on our streets, we have to acknowledge that investment into community facilities and programmes like local sports clubs and activity centres is vital if we are to support community cohesion, and with it, community wellbeing.
How does sport and physical activity impact on your community, and how would you feel if it was no longer there?
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