"I am on the Youth Board to collaborate with like-minded young people with a passion for inclusivity." Gemma, Youth Board Member 2023

The Access Sport Youth Board have started 2023 with lots of enthusiasm and energy! We’re really excited about the year ahead whilst contributing our collective voices to the wider work Access Sport delivers to support marginalised young people.

This year entails many different areas of development opportunities for the Youth Board including a friendly match against London Titan’s Wheelchair Basketball Team (more on this to follow soon), workshops with different Access Sport staff members and developing our own project named the Empowerment Grant.

The Empowerment Grant will see us planning and delivering our own project over the summer which will support more disabled young people to be active in South East London. This project will feature across Changing Places London and the Youth Board will attend a Project Management workshop hosted by Access Sport staff. We will better understand and develop the capabilities required to successfully deliver a project including understanding who we’re going to engage, the access barriers young disabled people face playing sport and monitoring and evaluating our work.

Alongside this, other focuses for the group include discussing the cost-of-living crisis and creating new ‘persona’ profiles which will be used in different training sessions with community sports clubs, coaches and volunteers.

We will also be hosting Access Sport’s CEO Helen Rowbotham at our next meeting in May to further understand how the youth voice is applied to organisation and we look forward to meeting more of the Trustees at another meeting later in the year.

The Youth Board are also very excited to welcome 5 new members to the group. Katherine, Rhys, Chloe, Gemma and Georgia joined the Board earlier in March. They have a variety of skills and interests ranging from sports consultancy to competing in sports at high levels and all collectively want to be a voice and advocate for young people and community sport. The Youth Board looks forward to working with them to further help drive social impact in the future.  

We look forward to sharing more updates about our work across the year. To find out more about the Youth Board and learn more about our members visit the webpage below:

Youth Board webpage

Written by: Dren, Access Sport Youth Board Chair