I have enjoyed being part of a stakeholder board this year and have gained huge insight into the challenges national governing bodies of sport face, post pandemic, to grow their membership bases and improve international relations.
Being part of an Olymipc qualifying World Championship Event project in a voluntary capacity has been a great opportunity to work with talented and committed people. All of whom love sport, and want to reach more people through inclusive actions and plans.
This was my first large scale funded event project working with UK Sport, and my take out from helping to build a relationship along with the stakeholder board is UK Sport are absolutely credible and committed to their long term strategy.
As a board and team, we managed to meet our objectives and deliver our strategic aims in line with contractual requirements, revenue targets and budget. No mean feet considering the UK cost of living crisis, and international challenges highlighted in Ukraine and Russia.
My thoughts as an Independent Chair post event are that our board was reflective of the challenges we faced. We tried to keep our objectives central to our decision making process and developed a "fit for purpose" risk management strategy, which helped governance.
One area where I think this approach really bore fruit was by involving subject matter experts, elite athletes, safegaurding teams, sustainability policy makers, and inclusive sport amabassadors. This allowed our board to fully understanding the core issues and start to rationalise a range of strategies to meet our goals. And, working with partners or stakeholders who can guide policy development is a must to save time, maximise resources and help you get it right first time more often than not. From a board perspective, selecting a board with robust industry knowledge and individual areas of "specialism" does help to positively challenge ideas and plans to shape sound decisions.
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I have really enjoyed working with boards and senior leadership teams across sport, digital and fashion projects this year, some have been operationally heavy and labour intensive, others very much change led and time sensitive with varying budgets from 20k to £1.4 million. I hope to take on a mix of commercial and voluntary projects going forward into next year. I aim to focus a bunch of my diary time going forward working on projects with partners who want to make a positive impact in some of these areas;
🛑 Using elite events to reach broader audiences
🛑 Driving physical activity
🛑 Building opportunities to drive inclusive sport development
🛑 Working in partnership to maximise sport investment linking grass roots to elite success
If I can help you start to understand your challenges please reach out for a chat.
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