What better way to start the new year than with an exciting new role to get your teeth into?
In January, I joined the Richmond Group of Charities as the new programme director leading the We Are Undefeatable physical activity programme following a significant stint running behaviour change programmes in the active travel sector.
With Sport England funding recently confirmed up to March 2028, it was a great time to join the team and get cracking.
A busy year from the start
We Are Undefeatable is a game-changing programme, bringing together an impactful behaviour change campaign with thought-leading policy, and influencing work to support and encourage people with long-term health conditions to be active in ways that work for them.
Throw in a new strand of place-based pilot work starting later this year, plus lived experience voices underpinning all we do, and we’ve got a huge amount to offer the sector and our key audiences.
So, unsurprisingly, this year is shaping up to be an exciting one already.
To kick us off in January we launched our new place-based approach, inviting expressions of interest from a range of areas, all of whom are already connected to the Sport England place expansion work.
Our place-based work will build on our experiences so far working with Blackburn with Darwen and Lancashire on local versions of the We Are Undefeatable campaign to support places to embed systems change, increase opportunities for movement and frictionless pathways to physical activity for those with long-term health conditions. We look forward to announcing our new partnerships in the spring.
Earlier in February, we held our inaugural Lived Experience Network session.
This group will be pivotal as we move into the next phases of the programme, ensuring we are keeping the experiences and perspectives of our key audiences at the heart of our deliverables.
It’s also already proving valuable to our partners (including the Faculty of Sport and Exercise Medicine and the Active Partnerships National Organisation on the Moving Together programme), tapping into key expertise as meaningful contributors to work in development.
We’ll be lining up more opportunities for this collaborative working over the year and will continue to demonstrate to our network the impacts of their involvement.