Sport Birmingham
Creating long-lasting legacy for local communities following the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.
Our partnership with Sport Birmingham, Birmingham City Council, The Active Wellbeing Society and the Canal And River Trust, comes through the Commonwealth Active Communities fund, to improve facilities and level up access to community sport, creating long-lasting legacy for local communities following the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.
Together we embarked on 5 community projects in 2022-2023, across five wards with the greatest levels of inactivity and low socio-economic mobility, to improve the quality and access to sport and physical activity for the local community. Here’s what we achieved.
Saltley Stallions FC, Bordesley Green
This club was created to help remove cultural and other barriers for women to play football. In partnership with Barclays Community Football Fund, here we divided the changing rooms, enabled male/female toilets and created social seating areas, all to help existing and new players, particularly young female Muslim players, and their friends and families to feel included and welcome in their sporting environment. All with the help of 20 local young people, the majority of whom have refugee status here in Birmingham. Hear from some of them here.
Paddle Hub, Ackers Adventure, Sparkbrook
To help create a Paddlesports Hub in the grounds of Ackers Adventure, we and 16 local young people transformed an empty shipping container into a safe canoe storage hub, through handmade wooden shelving stands, to help them store their canoes right by the water’s edge.
Since the project, the Paddle Hub have improved their offer to the local community and increased participation levels from young people, the elderly, people from low socio-economic and minority ethnic groups.
“The works VIY have completed have furthered our ambitions to expand the Paddle Hub. Without the storage they have created, we would struggle to accommodate more members, as we simply would not be able to keep our canoes safe.
Now we can finally invite more of the local community to join us on the canals, doing something active right on their doorstep. Thanks to all of the local young people who helped transform our storage container!”
Andy Train, Leader, Paddlesports Hub, Ackers Adventure
St Pauls Trust, Balsall Heath
St Pauls Community Trust offers a wide range of different activities for Post 16 students and the local community; a safe environment to take part in a variety of different sports such as basketball, football and indoor skating, educational classes including Maths and English and a digital arts space to create music, podcasts and interviews. We helped create an indoor music booth to boost this space and an outdoor seating booth for parents and the local community take part in and support the different sports activities taking place.
Concord Youth Centre, Sparkbrook
As a vital facility for local young people in a ward of high deprivation, inactivity and unemployment, used for sports, employment advice and generally a safe space to be, we helped to make the youth centre more inviting for further activity through a full redecoration of the centre in their club colours, as well as creating storage solutions in an empty cupboard to expand their gym/sports offer.
Muath Trust, Sparkbrook
We helped to renovate the sports hall of The Muath Trust, a vital community organisation serving many diverse community and promoting harmony with one another. We built and decorated renewed cladding around the edges of the vast hall to protect and spruce up the environment, to encourage even more young people and adults from the local community to continue and begin to take part in physical activity in improved surroundings.
