Engaging more disabled people in the South-East - EFDS Regional Forum
The English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS) employs Engagement Advisors who are based across England. As part of their role, they engage with those who support and influence disabled people to be more active across the nine English regions. One of the ways they do this is to facilitate regional forums.
Jon Whittingham is the EFDS Engagement Advisor for the South-East region. Here, he provides an update on this week's Regional Forum in Woking.
Jon’s update
The South-East Regional Forum took place on Tuesday 14 April at the Active Surrey offices in Woking.
The focus this month was on presentations from three National Governing Bodies (NGBs) in the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA), England Boxing and the Wheelchair Dance Sport Association. Also in attendance was one National Disability Sports Organisations (NDSOs) in British Blind Sport.
Also there were disability leads from the regional County Sports Partnership (CSPs) – Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Oxfordshire, Surrey and Sussex.
After a brief opening to the meeting, the opening presentation was from the ASA who discussed their new staffing structure and future work programmes, including determining on future work in conjunction with the CSPs present.
England Boxing followed, and discussed their pilot project, that has been taking place in Hampshire, Kent and Sussex, to introduce boxing sessions to other counties. Discussions then followed as to how they are looking to expand the pilot to further CSPs over the coming year and develop greater resource to support those who were interested in getting involved.
British Blind Sport opened their update with a quick introduction of their new Strategic Lead, before outlining their potential focus over the coming months which included a quiz of those present to see what knowledge there was in the room already of the work that British Blind Sport do.
The last of the presentations was delivered by the Wheelchair Dance Sport Association, who highlighted a successful training course and session setup in Oxfordshire that had seen 22 people take part in a taster session. Their future focus is to move into offering more sessions in more CSPs and expand their reach into local communities as a fully inclusive sport.
Wheelchair Dance Sport Association
Each presentation was followed by a discussion, and all in attendance could ask questions of the presenters which generated some interesting debate as to how the CSPs could support the proposed work within their county boundaries.
Each CSP also gave an update as to the key successes they had had over the previous months since the last meeting, and it was great to hear of the amount of work that is now going on while also sharing good practice and support on areas where challenges had been identified.
To round off the meeting, I gave an update on two key developments from EFDS around the release late last year of the Talk to Me report and then the Charter for Change that was released in February 2015.
Discussion took place around each of the developments as to how the CSPs, NGBs and NDSOs could sign up to and support both aspects, and utilise them to assist with their development work in their own areas.
I will shortly confirm the next meeting date so that the region can continue to work together to offer more opportunities for disabled people to take part in sport and physical activity.
