Winter Warriors is a collaborative initiative between Access Sport and Nova Sports & Coaching, to donate inclusive multisport equipment and activity booklets to families across our projects, with a focus on reaching disabled children and their families.

Nova Sports & Coaching are a Bath based community interest company who usually deliver disability inclusive coaching through outreach in schools, holiday programmes and community clubs. Access Sport has been supporting Nova Sports to launch new Race Running and Powerchair Football Clubs in Bristol, developing a great partnership built on shared values. Over the first lockdown, we worked with Nova to deliver Activity Booklets and Equipment Boxes to families across the South West. Due to this success, we wanted to roll out the initiative further to benefit more families across Access Sport’s programmes whilst also supporting a small local group to keep their doors open during this tough time.

"We received our pack yesterday and it couldn’t have arrived at a better time, my son was put into self isolation today due to close contact with a confirmed COVID case. Our sports pack will allow us to keep active whilst staying at home."

The Access Sport team designed the Winter Warriors initiative to support families to remain active during the winter months, whilst community clubs may be closed for the holidays or shut due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For many families with disabled children, they do not have their own equipment to be active at home. As part of the initiative each family will receive one of our fantastic Activity Booklets with over 30 different inclusive activities to suit all abilities, ages and home situations. The Activity Booklets encourage individual and whole family activity, as well as fun wellbeing ideas like baking, quizzes and outdoor scavenger hunts to ensure families have a range of activities to do to support their physical and mental wellbeing.

We are encouraging families to join our Winter Warriors Tribe Facebook group so they can share their experiences and photos using their equipment and activity booklets, as well as receive even more activity ideas and resources to get the most out of their packs. Every disabled child and young person who is a part of our Winter Warriors Tribe has the opportunity to receive their own Winter Warriors t-shirt to wear proudly!

So far, we have had over 500 orders from families across London, Bristol, Manchester and Oxford and we aim to reach 750 orders by the end of the December!

Check back in with us after Christmas when we will be sharing the impact of the Winter Warriors initiative and see what fantastic activities our families will have gotten up to!