Humans of Grassroots Sport | Chelsea Piggott

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Get Berkshire Active Programme Delivery Officer, Chelsea Piggott, told us her story for our latest Humans of Grassroots Sport entry.

I’ve been with Get Berkshire Active since last October and cannot believe it’s almost been a year since I joined.

The charities sheer range of work was one of the key attractions for me and it opened a path for me to be involved in our innovative Activate Project.

Our project is an extension of the Britwell Youth Project, the local youth club owned by Berkshire Youth. We run a complimentary service to get even more young people in the community active by participating in additional sports sessions.

It is based in Slough, in an area of significant deprivation. We have engaged around 200 young people and families in the project so far.

Sport has played an integral role given its power to engage with our younger local audience. Before implementing any ideas, we carried out focus groups within the local secondary schools, as well as a questionnaire for wider input, to truly understand what young people want.

Similarly, we were keen to work with professionals to share thoughts and ideas about to how best to approach our mission. We tried to come into these sessions with an open mind and avoided having any kind of agenda, which enables us to flow naturally around the various topics.

Ultimately our aim is to find solutions to increase physical activity levels and provide meaningful and divergent activities for those young people aged 11+ in the area.

I’m pleased to say the planning stage is complete now and we’re excited to get going.

When speaking to young people within the focus groups, key themes around barriers and motivations became apparent. These included topics such as social life/ friendships, social media, transferable skills, online gaming, community safety and incentives.

Competitiveness outside of our team exists only in doing our best to help the young community. Our aim is getting people the right help and it doesn’t matter if that’s with us or another service.

To get that right we have invested a lot of time in the gathering opinions as well as mapping what people have and what they need within the community. Armed with this we then develop partnerships with various entities in Berkshire to help with provisions for families.

We want to set something up for the long term and that’s why getting people into the right schemes is vital to the work. Sport is such a good way to engage with people and we’re giving coaches and clubs the platform to help youth groups.

If you’d like to find out more about the, Activate Project please check out our website – http://getberkshireactive.org/8187/news/article/britwell-summer-fun/ or call 01628 472851