We are now entering our final full year of operations; 2025 will be a year in which we consolidate all the knowledge from our remaining grants, hold our final conference and release a suite of products and an archive designed to help our sector long after Spirit has closed. Not only that, but we have another big year of events including the Women’s Rugby World Cup and the start of Bradford’s year as City of Culture. But before we get there, let’s have a look back at this year’s highlights.
January – March: Beginning the journey inspired by youth and music
After celebrating 10 years of Spirit at the end of 2023, the first quarter of 2024 saw us take important steps into our next phase, with the appointment of three learning partners to continue our work through this year and beyond – Pro Bono Economics, Belong Network and Loughborough University.
We also celebrated one year of the Power of Events Inquiry and started to amplify the work designed to build on it, including the publication of FRY Creative’s Events Data Aggregation report, a strong start on our goal to help establish a data observatory for events.
Two of our flagship programmes came to a close we received evaluation reports from UK Youth & #iwill’s Inspire project and the legacy grant for EmpowHER. We would go on to reflect on our long relationship with #iwill and all we learned about youth social action as a result during #iwill Week, later in the year.
Finally, we published our Music & Wellbeing report, the first of 2024’s thematic publications which look across Spirit’s funding in a particular space. It contained a wealth of lessons from the Music Challenge Fund, Carers’ Music Fund, Creative Arts East’s Our Day Out and more, showing how participatory music projects can have a transformative effect of mental and physical health.
April – June: Talking sport, Scotland & Creating The Golden Thread
As the year continues, reports and resources come in from British Future’s Shared Goals and Moment To Connect projects Year of The King and The Spirit of Windrush. Our focus turns to Scotland as we hold a great Power of Sport conference to celebrate Spirit’s decade of work & funding which began with seeking to create a legacy from the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and spread nationwide. We summarised it all in our Spirit in Scotland report which launched in the same week.
Perhaps the defining moment of our year came right at the tail end of June, with the launch of FRY Creative’s Event Data Observatory Feasibility Report and Creating The Golden Thread – our collaboration with Warwick Business School which looked at ways to enrich the infrastructure around events, strengthening the ‘connective tissue’ which binds them. Following a superb launch in the House of Lords, these two publications once again moved forward important work started by the Inquiry, and would go on to define the rest of our year.
July – September: The summer of sport
As the Paris 2024 Olympic & Paralympic Games kicked into gear, we supported the Get Set: Path To Paris programme, which inspired young people to take up physical activity in light of the major events. It was also a great opportunity to discuss Spirit, sport and events legacy with our patrons – Baroness Sue Campbell and Susie Rodgers MBE – while we asked them and others whether they could see another bid from the UK for the Games in 2040. Simultaneously, we celebrated 10 years of Glasgow 2014 with major polling which suggests that the impact of Commonwealth Games is still being felt.
We continued the theme of major sporting events with the publication of Loughborough’s feasibility study for the Capital of Sport – another major stride for one of the key Inquiry action points. It laid out a roadmap for how a new competition, which takes the principle behind UK City of Culture and applies it to sport and physical activity, could potentially work. We also built on the Creating The Golden Thread by hosting the first of our regional roundtables in Northern Ireland (see below for more on this).
This period also saw Activity Alliance release the final impact report for our flagship grant Get Out, Get Active. After 8 years and £7.5 million invested, the project has reached over 55,000 people with their unique approach to physical activity. Truly the end of an era!
Our last highlight for the summer involved the publication of our next themed report on Spirit’s youth social action funding. Featuring insights from the likes of the EmpowHER, Critical Mass and Fourteen projects, it contained guidance on how to use events to inspire a new generation with volunteering.
October – December: Looking towards our final year
We finished out the year with a few more key publications. The first output from Belong’s learning partnership with Spirit landed, looking over the range of Spirit’s social cohesion work and distilling the learning down into one succinct document.
Next, the University of the West of Scotland released their EDI Playbook for events, based on research they did as part of their Festivals Connect project which looked at a number of events in Scotland to see how they could strengthen EDI outcomes.
Elsewhere, LLDC’s Elevate Board awarded the Elevate Fund, which was comprised of our last grant award, to 31 local individuals and organisations in East London. That’s the year, and we can’t wait to see how the legacy of London 2012 and the power of events continues to shape our approach as we head into our final year.