Small steps to change at your club
Recently I spoke to Professor Leanne Norman. In this extract from the podcast, she gives advice for anyone wanting to create local ripples of change at their club.
Whoever you are, don’t underestimate the power of the small steps you can take. Whatever role you’re in, we all have influence.
So it doesn’t matter if you’re a community sports coach that’s only coaching a couple of hours a week, you don’t have to be in a powerful leadership role within a governing body.
It’s okay to start small, but it’s not okay to stand still. The small changes often come from relationships. When you go back into your sporting environment have conversations with people.
These conversations enable us to build relationships so that we can start questioning things. “Why do we do that around here?” or “Could we do this a bit better?”
These questions and conversations can open our eyes to some of the practices that we take for granted.
Build collaborations and relationships within your club to enable you to look at things differently. The goal of this is to do things better and to be better as a club or organisation.
I'm a bit reticent about using EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) because I think there's a lot of EDI fatigue. People will roll their eyes or think it's separate to what we do as a club or as a sport.
However, social justice and those terms, they’re what should be a part of our core business and they make us better as a club.
For example, some sports are hemorrhaging players. Imagine losing players at a club. In order to develop as a club, we need to reach more people.
That’s part of the benefits of having more diverse athletes and participants. They will grow our club, they'll grow our sport, and they make our environment better as well.
If you’re a community coach that just coaches for a couple of hours,try and look at the way that you coach to make sure you’re coaching in a welcoming, inclusive way.
This doesn’t just mean that you’re not stopping anyone from coming into your coaching. It means you’re building those relationships with our participants and our athletes to make people feel like they belong.
That’s small, but yet so powerful,
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