HomeFundingProjectsTeam Spirit

Team Spirit

England Athletics
Grantholder

A programme designed to get people involved in grassroots Athletics, running, and to transform the experience and diversity of volunteering.

Project information

£965,565

Grant amount

September 2016

Date awarded

November 2016 – October 2019

Project dates

England

Location

Project Detail

In September 2016 Spirit of 2012 awarded a grant to England Athletics in advance of the 2017 World Athletics Championships, which were being hosted in London, for a project to develop their club volunteer workforce. The application was solicited following learning from London 2012, where England Athletics found that many local athletics clubs did not have enough volunteers to meet an increase in interest from potential participants inspired by the Olympic and Paralympic Games. England Athletics wished to both grow the number of regular volunteers and adapt to changes in volunteering habits, whilst diversifying the volunteer workforce so that it was more demographically similar to its participant base.

Its aims were:

  1. Prioritise creating positive experiences for new and existing volunteers
  2. Create supportive environments that make it easier for existing volunteers to stay involved, to feel happier and valued
  3. Develop a volunteering workforce that better reflects society, helping people who have a love of the sport to easily get, and stay, involved

Between 2017 and 2019 the project provided training, mentoring, and support to volunteers and clubs, ran events to celebrate volunteering, and gathered vital insight to inform future strategy. It increased volunteer satisfaction and wellbeing, helped diversify club volunteer bases, and created a legacy of learning to shape the future of volunteer support across athletics.

The project closed in 2019, earlier than originally planned, with a final total grant spend of £572,536.

Impact & Learning

Key learnings

  • The Team Spirit Evaluation offers valuable, practical insights for sports governing bodies looking to successfully drive large-scale culture change in their volunteering programmes.
  • This was a complex project, with England Athletics aiming to create culture change at volunteer-led clubs. Part of the intention was to create more flexible forms of volunteering which would reduce the barrier to entry and time commitment required to be a club volunteer. However, recruiting a greater number of occasional, short-term or inexperienced volunteers risked increasing the workload for the volunteer coordinators at each club, who were themselves unpaid.
  • The Game Changers strand was successful at supporting clubs to integrate younger people into the volunteer workforce, but less successful at achieving planned increases to the numbers of disabled volunteers, and volunteers from Black & ethnic minority backgrounds.
  • There were also challenges with gathering monitoring information from each club at the right level of granularity. England Athletics wanted to know whether the volunteer workforce at each club was becoming more reflective of its resident community, but diversity targets were being monitored at aggregate level, rather than specific to each place.

397

young volunteers

across 46 clubs through the ‘Game Changers’ strand with 100% reporting skill improvements

95%

of volunteers

received a formal qualification

91%

of volunteers

said it had helped prepare them for the workplace

12%

increase

in volunteer satisfaction across clubs over the programme (77% – 89%)

351

volunteers

got training and support from the Championships programme

1400

participants

in dedicated online volunteer community

32

clubs

supported to grow capacity and improve volunteer experience, including launching an internal Volunteering Operational Group and new volunteer strategy.

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