Gameplan: Introduction
An exciting momentum is building among stakeholders who are focused on disrupting usual ways of working to address stubborn inequalities by getting more people moving and engaged with their own communities. This is captured in the fresh, new ‘test and learn’ approaches being piloted at local and national levels, for example UK Sport’s Powering Success Inspiring Impact Strategic Plan 2021-31 , Sport England’s Uniting the Movement: 10-year vision and their 12 Local Delivery Pilots (LDPs). One of these LDPs is Get Doncaster Moving which is taking a whole systems approach to getting local communities more physically active and engaged in Doncaster’s inclusive growth ambitions. Agreement is growing about ‘ what’ is needed to make this disruption happen. The call to action is to adopt principles and approaches that support place-based community engagement. This is underpinned by a commitment to understanding the way people live, shifts of power, new collaborations, leadership, trusting relationships, and flexibility. It also requires assessing the value or success of actions and events differently. However, the practical ‘how’ of achieving this shift is still a work in progress. It involves learning from practitioners on the ground who share the results of their activities with(in) their own unique communities. It will never be possible to identify a one size fits all approach, but tactics used in one context to make changes through physical activity, sport and related events can be adopted, adapted, and improved to save time for others working elsewhere. Gameplan captures the best of what has been learnt so far from Doncaster Council’s bold collaborative approach to the delivery of big sports events. Within Gameplan we purposely use the term ‘big event’ to encompass the broad spectrum of event types and scales where Gameplan learning can be applied. This enables Gameplan knowledge to be used flexibly and applied to different contexts. Gameplan shares what has been learned about leveraging big sporting events to maximise social impact and how events can act as a catalyst, or sparkler , that can burn bright to get people moving, and more actively engaged in their own communities. The challenge is maximising this sparkler effect so that benefits do not fizzle out when the event has gone. Doncaster Council, through their involvement in Sport England’s LDP, commissioned a team of researchers from Leeds Beckett University to work with Get Doncaster Moving, their partners and local communities to conduct research and co-create practical interventions aimed at better understanding and optimising the local social impacts of big sporting events hosted in Doncaster. We have distilled what we have learned so far into a four-step process ( Ready , Set , Go , Next ), designed to help event organisers develop a social impact Gameplan . Gameplan contains 25 tactics that provide guidance, or ‘helpful hows’, for implementing this
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