Newsletter

The e-zine of the Community Sport Initiative, which includes the Community Sport Programme and Active Lifestyles in Northern Ireland, Active Futures in Scotland and Mentro Allan in Wales.

Welcome to the first edition of Active Times, your new quarterly newsletter. This will bring you updates on the programme, emerging evaluation findings, learning from other programme evaluations, news updates and much more.

The newsletter is an opportunity to showcase your project and let other funded projects know of your successes. So let us have your stories.

It is your newsletter - so let us have your views. Is there something you would like covered in the next edition? You can email us directly at bigcsi@hallaitken.co.uk.

In this issue

• Discover the www.bigcsi.com website
• Community Sport: evaluation update
• Case studies - engaging young people
• Active-ability
• Attracting participants

Discover the www.bigcsi.com website

The Community Sport Initiative is all about trying out new approaches and seeing how it works - learning from the experience and sharing that knowledge. To help spread that learning, we set up a support website for Community Sport Initiative projects - www.bigcsi.com. More...

Community Sport: Evaluation update

We consulted with a number of projects over the course of 2006. We asked a number of questions about how your project was planned, set up and delivered and drew a number of conclusions. Our evaluation findings to date are summarised in a Year One evaluation report. More... (PDF format, 493KB)

Case studies - engaging young people

Each quarter we will feature case studies. For this first edition we focus on projects working with young people.

Young people are the most common target group among projects surveyed - and the core target group for the Active Futures programme in Scotland. On the www.bigcsi.com website you will find several case studies on projects working with young people from a range of angles. More…

Active-ability

Having a disability is no barrier to being active. Malcolm McClean reports on some of the Community Sport Initiative and Active England projects which are pushing back the boundaries. More...

Recruiting, retaining and managing volunteers

Volunteers represent a major resource for the life of many sports clubs and physical activity projects. Our evaluation over the first year of the Community Sport Initiative highlights a reliance and dependency on volunteer helpers. But recruiting volunteers is difficult and engaging the right people is a challenge. Providing training and support and sustaining volunteer involvement can also be time consuming and resource intensive. So to help you we have put together a guide to recruiting, retaining and managing volunteers. More...