Sport England Families Fund Report
In 2018, Sport England launched The Families Fund to increase opportunities for families and children to do sport and physical activity together. Smile Through Sport were extremely thrilled to be one of 39 funded projects across England. The funding provided organisations four years of funding to increase activity levels of children aged 5 to 15, support and enable families to be active together and to provide positive experiences and develop positive attitudes towards activity.
Sport England have published the findings and impact of The Families Fund from the 39 projects. As a brief overview of the report it shows 10,451 families and 29,979 participants engaged and benefitted from the funding. With all funded projects reporting the positive impacts on families levels of physical activity and highlighting that families “getting out more” has positively improved their feelings of happiness, confidence, self-efficacy and social trust. To explore more of Sport England’s Families Fund Report click here
A reflection on our own Families Fund project, Smile Together, where the focus was on families living in Northumberland with a disabled family member. We can report that 214 families and 736 participants engaged with the activities sessions and provision through the funding. The Smile Together project delivered and provided 210 face to face sport and physical activity sessions which were open to all families to attend, these took place in Berwick, Alnwick, Hexham, Ashington, Blyth, Prudhoe and Stocksfield.
We had a wonderful time. Everyone was so welcoming and even the most reluctant of our group was thoroughly enjoying it by the end!”
Alongside the open family sessions, we provided 84 one to one sessions which were delivered to individual families. The families who accessed the 0ne to 0ne sessions benefitted greatly from a quite environment that purely focused specifically of their needs.
Of course, as a result of Covid-19 our delivery plan and structure of the project changed to adapt to the current situation we all found ourselves in, this resulted in 70 online sessions being delivered and 1129 activity packs and activity booklets were sent out to families across the region to allow and encourage activity to continue at home.
“Having fun with our sports pack and having indoor obstacle course! Our son is also making up his own activities too like balancing the bean bags on his head”
“Thank you for the sports kit, my daughter had such a laugh using it”
