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Community Investment: Place Partnerships

Active Norfolk/Our Impact/Community Investment: Place Partnerships

What are Place Partnerships?

Place Partnerships are a key initiative by Sport England to foster local change and encourage physical activity. These partnerships are part of the broader Uniting the Movement strategy. This strategy focuses on addressing inactivity and the inequalities that contribute to it.

This approach allows us to work collaboratively with local government, and health and social care to create dedicated capacity in each local authority district. It is our belief that this capacity will drive the development and implementation of local plans to improve lives through physical activity and sport.

Who are the target audience?

In 2017, Sport England launched 12 Local Delivery Pilots (LDPs) to collaborate with communities and organisations in areas of greatest need. This place-based approach aimed to tackle inactivity and related inequalities by identifying barriers and developing local solutions together.

What are the Place Partnerships goals?

Sport England have announced 53 places they will be expanding their Place Partnership work into, in order to address regional inequalities in inactivity levels across England. These will join the 12 existing Place Partnerships (formerly Local Delivery Pilots) established in 2017.
Amongst these are King’s Lynn & West Norfolk, and Great Yarmouth; both have been identified in the top 10% of the country for inactivity, social need, deprivation and health inequality at a national level.

How are we achieving these goals?

Active Norfolk led a two-part development award application to Sport England, co-produced with local partners. The first phase funded a project coordinator and an insight and evaluation officer.

Additional funding, secured in October 2024, will help us understand local priorities by reviewing data. We have been consulting stakeholders, exploring assets, and engaging with communities to identify knowledge gaps. We will then deliver and evaluate initiatives to inform our 2025 full award submission.

We know that the investment needs to target areas where there are barriers to participation, be it financial, accessibility, or lack of facilities, especially for underrepresented groups.

Our impact so far

Year one focused on insight-led prioritisation and decision making using a combination of data, stakeholder, community, and contextual insights to build a picture of the place and its needs and opportunities.

These different forms of insight were used to develop a funnel model for drilling down to a focus audience, area or priority which has been the basis of our approach in both North Lynn and Great Yarmouth.​

This collaborative approach is steering towards local action that aims to target and shift inequalities and provide opportunities to test and learn new ways of working.​

Great Yarmouth Timeline

At the Place Based Leadership Course 6-month follow-up session, members completed a ripple effect mapping (REM) group exercise.​

The session provided an opportunity to reflect on any ways that Place working has affected change and created impact (intended or unintended).​

Great Yarmouth learnings:

Creating opportunities for stakeholders to learn more about this way of working has got people thinking and talking about it, encouraging connections and growing their understanding and confidence.​

There’s a lot of energy in the system for trying different ways of working. However, this way of working requires those involved in the process to have/develop a culture of being open-minded, collaborative, inquisitive and adaptable which may be a difficult shift from past styles of working.​

Collaborative working between organisations creates a strong foundation for place-based working requiring trust and respect to allow equal and inclusive discussions.​

True place-based working requires us to embrace complexity and open-endedness, however this also risks an overwhelming amount of information, number of possibilities, range of decisions which could result in not knowing where to start and what to do. There needs to be a balance between trying to keep things manageable, whilst avoiding reverting back to past ways of working which are more siloed, top-down and system-driven rather than place- and people-centred and fight our urge to come-up with solutions for the community.​

Potential to learn what role physical activity can play in other agendas and whether this approach can empower communities to drive action locally to achieve sustainable ​long-term impact.

King’s Lynn & West Norfolk timeline

At the Place Based Leadership Course 6-month follow-up session, course attendees completed a ripple effect mapping (REM) group exercise.​

The session provided an opportunity to reflect on any ways that Place working has affected change and created impact (intended or unintended).​

West Norfolk learnings:

Engaging people at different stages of the process requires us to be mindful of ensuring everyone is up to the same level of understanding theoretically and practically at all stages. Getting in the practice of recapping, encouraging “no stupid questions” ethos and explaining and referring to the funnel in an accessible way.​

Who you involve at different stages is important and there may be differing opinions of this. It’s important to consciously consider who are the key representatives at each stage of the process.​

True place-based working requires us to embrace complexity and open-endedness, however this also risks an overwhelming amount of information, number of possibilities, range of decisions which could result in not knowing where to start and what to do.

There needs to be a balance between trying to keep things manageable, whilst avoiding reverting back to past ways of working which are more siloed, top-down and system driven rather than place- and people-centred and fight our urge to come up with solutions for the community.

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