2020 Winners | Sport 4 Life UK
Sport 4 Life UK
Winner – Improving Impact – charities with 4-25 paid staff
Who they are
Sport 4 Life UK (S4L) believes in a level playing field where every young person has the opportunity to create a better future for themselves.
The charity proudly provides the opportunity for young people aged 11 to 29 to prepare for, and move into, sustained education, employment, or training. S4L aims to improve participants’ employability and key life skills through its sport-themed mentoring and training services.
What they’ve achieved
In 2019, Sport 4 Life completed an 18-month initiative, ‘Impact for Growth’ that transformed the organisation with a new service delivery model, allowing it to use its resources more efficiently while improving impact and reaching more beneficiaries. Working with delivery partners, the organisation shifted away from a ‘one size fits all’ programme-based approach, to a more youth-led and needs-based mentoring service.
The board was in part inspired by an external report, the APPG [All Part Parliamentary Group] ‘Those Furthest From The Labour Market’, which found: ‘A one-size fits all approach does not work. Education, employment and welfare services must begin to recognise the unique potential of each young person and that what works for one does not necessarily work for all.’ Additionally, the board listened to feedback from S4L’s young service users, which made it clear that most preferred to have ‘just one person’ supporting them. The board, with the help of the senior managment team, trialed an increased level of ‘one-to-one mentoring’, shifting towards a more individualised and needs-led mentoring programme. The programme allowed one-to-one mentoring to evolve to more bespoke services according to need, progressing onto other activities (e.g. accredited qualifications, more structured sport, mock interviews). This approach reduced the enrolment delay for young people progressing into meaningful activity, and increased the change the charity was able to affect among individual service users.
Using benchmarks to compare results from the old delivery model with that of the pilot left the board in little doubt that the risk had paid off. Of the 126 sustained job outcomes that S4L achieved in 2018, 58 were achieved through the (former) ‘programme’ approach, which involved four full-time members of staff, while 68 were achieved through the pilot’s mentoring-based approach, which was delivered by only two full-time members of staff — half of the resources were used in the pilot to achieve a greater level of impact.
Why they won
The judges were impressed by the organisation’s commitment to listening to young people, using what they said, together with use of external evidence, to reshape the whole operation — responding with a more customised approach to service delivery. Trustees provided strong leadership in the areas of culture, service model development, risk and income generation, particularly in recognising the opportunity (and bravely accepting the risk) to change the charity’s operating model. Sport 4 Life clearly explained the board’s role in leading the charity through this transformational moment, provided data and anecdotes to demonstrate what the organisation achieved, and described what the board was doing to ensure that its new delivery model was sustainable and that it could continue to effectively evaluate ongoing impact to inform its future decision making.
