Boosting impact for sports clubs and active community spaces

To maximise and enhance the longer-term sustainability of VIY’s impact on grassroots sports clubs, projects match-funded through our partnership with Sport England, we’ve contracted Sporting Assets to intensively support a selection of clubs through the VIY Club Improvement Programme.

The clubs targeted are those most in need, described as ‘just about surviving’ and a chance to nudge clubs to improve across their finance, governance and community outreach. We aim to maximise impact and secure investment into the facility transformation, whilst encouraging clubs to improve in related club development elements to ensure they can provide sport and physical opportunities to a wide audience.

The offer is bespoke to clubs, and broadly consists of between 2-3 months of support in which a diagnostic test is performed on each club, to understand the areas of improvement needs and the formation of a plan of support. The diagnostics serve as the monitoring and evaluation tool, alongside a questionnaire conducted to understand the experience the clubs have received. To ensure we engage a broad range of participants, projects in Year 4 of our programme with Sport England will automatically be enrolled with an ‘opt out’ system.