Rotherham United Community Sports Trust are set to be the first of our Local Delivery Partners nationwide to start delivering Levelling the Playing Field as part of their weekly sport and physical activity programme.
The Trust, which is the charitable partner of the town’s Championship football club, deliver sport, education, health and wellbeing and inclusion programmes to the communities surrounding Rotherham United’s New York Stadium.
Many of their activities target children from areas of deprivation, minority ethnic communities, individuals who are struggling in education or at-risk of becoming involved in the criminal justice system.
Staff have identified two weekly community activities which will shortly become dedicated Levelling the Playing Field sessions.
The first is a girls-only drop-in fitness session which takes place in the health suite at the stadium, which is located right in the centre of the town. The suite can facilitate weight training, circuits and cardio work and has boxercise equipment and TRX cables. The girls, many of whom are from BAME backgrounds, decide each week which activities to do.
“We tailor it completely to them,” says RUCST’s Inclusion Manager, Trudi Race. “What we’ve found from working with Muslim girls in particular is that privacy is very important to them when doing sport and physical activity. It’s important to them to have a female instructor, that no-one can see through the windows and no male staff can just walk through. It’s a secure, safe place for them.”
A community football session for boys is to be RUCST’s other dedicated weekly Levelling the Playing Field delivery setting. This will build on the Trust’s current football and boxing offerings in the nearby areas of Ferham, Masborough and Eastwood that are attended by young people from a great mixture of backgrounds including Roma-Slovak, Pakistani, Tamil and Yemeni.
Ahead of launch, the Trust’s delivery staff will undergo mentoring training which Trudi sees as a major benefit of signing up to Levelling the Playing Field. “That is something we don’t currently offer so we’re really keen on developing it through you guys. Being able to mentor a case load of young people who are currently disengaged from sport, education and employment is a great opportunity.”
Zanib Rasool MBE, RUCST’s Partnership and Development Manager, added that being able to better record the impact of their programmes was another attraction of coming on board.
“We deliver really good work and we see the benefits and impact it makes on the individual, but we would welcome support to get better at recording and evidencing that impact,” she admitted. “We have struggled to find the right tool and a lot of our current monitoring is just numbers – we miss that qualitative element. The evidencing is really appealing and helpful to us as an organisation, and puts us in a stronger position in terms of attracting future funding.”