interview
Who are Sporting Assets? Right hand side - Minister for Sport and Civil Society, Tracey Crouch at Leeds Urban Bike Park launch
grants and other investment. Our funding adds value by paying for the development of revenue generating services to support the overall project.
Q. How will you measure impact? As part of the deal to invest in partner organisations we will expect them to monitor and report on the work they are doing and its impact in their community. Organisations may already do this, and if so our requirements should fit into their existing processes. If organisations don’t have ways to monitor and report on the work they do, or these need to be improved, we will look to address this as part of getting ‘investment ready’. In partnership with social research company
Substance, we’ve designed a bespoke outcomes framework for the fund that allows investees to decide on what impact they will pursue and report on. At a fund level we will report on our impact annually.
Q. What are the challenges for community sports organisations? Many sports organisations deliver fantastic opportunities for their community, but are often living hand to mouth, and are reliant on the goodwill of their members and volunteers and from accessing grant funding. With pressure on funding and facilities, the financial position of these organisations is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Moving to a trading, community sports
business model, where they may manage an asset or deliver a wide range of activities is a real challenge as the starting point of the organisations is typically one where they: • are usually wholly volunteer led and staffed – often having an incomplete skill set for what investors would look for in a business
• have never traded or had to be responsible for an asset before
• have never had to think about generating alternate revenues other than membership and to a limited degree bar operations
• are not focussed on wider community impact (most have never needed to monitor/report on this beyond anecdotal subjective evidence). Developing the capability and capacity of
these organisations is therefore key. Since Sporting Assets was founded six years
ago, we have seen individual projects receive hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of pounds, with little regard given to their underlying sustainability. Too often the basics like assessing the demand for the project, looking at what people actually need and want and the business plan that underpins the longer-term delivery are the last things people focus on. Sports organisations need to think of themselves – and eventually function as – community sports businesses. For some organisations the transition is
smooth, for others it’s a fundamental shift that involves changing behaviour, building capacity and capability within the organisation and putting appropriate processes and procedures in place (governance and operations). Successful community sports businesses are
fantastic local assets, delivering a wide range of opportunities, and have the ingredients to deliver and grow for years to come. The social enterprise behind Leeds Urban
Bike Park are a great example of this, moving rapidly from a volunteer-led organisation to employing a number of staff and delivering a wide range of activities and services to support a great local facility.
www.sportingcapital.org.uk enquiries@sportingcapital.org.uk
Sporting Assets was founded by Tom Hall and Richard Speak in 2013, while Speak helped to establish the Blackburn Rovers supporters trust, raising £3m from fans in a few weeks with a view to the fans buying a stake in the club. When the trust failed to buy a stake in the club, it turned its focus to developing community sports activities locally. In doing this, Speak and Hall identified a gap in the market for enabling community organisations that deliver wider social good through sport to raise finance in innovative ways, and in particular to access social investment in its various forms. To meet this need they created Sporting Assets, a social enterprise with a clear mission to enable sport to work to support, sustain and grow healthy and resilient communities with sport and physical activity at their heart.
Sporting Assets’ first project, East Lancashire Football Development Association (ELFDA), was born out of the original trust work. The organisation transformed the capability and capacity of three not for profit, unincorporated amateur football leagues, creating a new community organisation (CBS exempt charity), which was then able to undertake the restoration of two redundant sport fields and bring them back into use via a Community Asset Transfer from the local authority.
In total, Sporting Assets supported ELFDA to raise £435,000 and create seven new football pitches over two sites. Sporting Assets continues to work with ELFDA, which wants take on more pitches and further complementary community asset transfers to provide additional revenue generating facilities.
Sporting Assets has worked with over 50 community sports organisations. It also works with the wider sports sector including Sport England, The Sport and Recreation Alliance, national governing bodies of sport and local authorities.
pactfacilities.co.uk 17
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