Greater Manchester is one of 12 places chosen by Sport England to work with on a new approach to build healthier, more active communities across England.
Many aspects of modern life make it harder to live a healthy and active life: convenience food, sedentary jobs with long hours, the types of transport on offer and even the entertainment that is most easily accessible are all designed to keep us sitting down.
With such a complex problem we must address the policy, environmental, social and individual factors that encourage or prevent active lives. This may sound straightforward but in reality it relies on everyone making it their mission to get others moving: employers, school and hospital staff, town planners, GP practices and community centres can all influence how much people move every day.
When whole systems work together to get people moving, we can also solve other problems too, such as improving educational attainment and health outcomes, supporting the local economy, reducing our impact on the environment and creating healthier, happier, safer places; collectively making Greater Manchester a better place for everyone to live.
Previous investments into physical activity has had an almost exclusive focus on short-term interventions that target individuals or small groups. While some of these investments may have led to change, the impact at a population-level is small, and often unsustainable.
To do this, they selected 12 areas across the country to be Local Delivery Pilots to test out this approach and share valuable learning with colleagues across the country. Greater Manchester was selected as one of these pilots, and you can find more information on the other 11 pilots here.
In 2023, the Local Delivery Pilot was rebranded as "Place Partners". This change in name reflects the significant progress made in our work and the transition from a testing phase to the full integration of this new way of working.
Since 2019, all 10 of the Greater Manchester localities and the town of Glossop have been involved in Greater Manchester's place partners work, with each locality developing their own vision on what place-based work and a whole systems approach on tackling inactivity looks like in their area.
To support the 11 localities the central GM place partners team have worked hard to create a shared identity and purpose creating an environment that encourages sharing, a safe space for innovation and testing new ways or working.
GM Moving have also embraced the Place Partner principles which can now be interwoven in our everyday work and has influenced a number of strategies.
Initially the work in GM focused on three key audiences:
The Place Partners work has now evolved and looks to demonstrate the impact and learning from the from the maturity of the system conditions, alongside the following five outcomes:
To support the Place Partners in Greater Manchester each borough is supported by four key enabling functions: evaluation, marketing, workforce development and engagement.
Follow the links below to learn more about the role and impact of the four enabling function below:
Sport England Chief Executive believes opportunities to play sport still far too determined by where you live as they aim to address this with new funding.
Our latest evaluation shows a growing maturity across the five enablers of change and a reduction in population level physical inactivity.
GreaterSport need a partner to provide marketing support to enable three boroughs to achieve a set of co-created objectives which inspire and motivate inactive residents to move more everyday.