Alison O’Connell MBE has joined the Levelling the Playing Field team as Regional Coordinator to help our West Midlands specialist partners maximise and evidence their impact on young people.
Alison has already started advising and liaising with our partners across Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry who all use sport and physical activity to positively impact on children in ethnically diverse communities.
Her role is to be Levelling the Playing Field’s ‘boots on the ground’ in the local area, helping our partners source training and funding, signposting young people to further sources of support and, most importantly, supporting organisations in recording their evidence through questionnaires and data collection.
Levelling the Playing Field and its partners can only achieve our common goals by rigorously capturing and recording our impact data, so the role of Regional Coordinators coordinating that process locally across our four delivery areas (London, West Midlands, South Yorkshire and Gwent) is vital.
Alison is already well acquainted with many of our West Midlands partners, having previously worked for our Local Strategic Partners, Sport Birmingham, as a Community Mentor, supporting grassroots sport and community organisations across the Second City.
“I’ve got good relationships with them all and there is a massive element of trust there,” said Alison. “One organisation said to me, ‘You’re like the fixer – you always find a solution and you’re always one step ahead.’
“I have my own experience of having a CIC so I know the challenges these organisations have got.”
Alison’s experience of the Sport for Development world is vast. She founded FITCAP (Fitness in the Community and Active Play) as a one-year project in 2006 – and it is still going strong 16 years later. She later set up the c, a youth mentoring programme for 11-16-year-olds.
Her work saw her honoured by the Queen and Prince Charles (now King Charles III) in 2014. You can read her full story here.
“I’m not going to barge through the door of the Levelling the Playing Field partners and demand to know why this and that haven’t been done,” Alison laughs. “It’s a case of finding out what their needs are in order to achieve their aims and offering my help in doing that. Hopefully they’ll say, ‘Let’s get this done, otherwise Alison is going to nag us!’”
Supporting partners with data collection will be a major part of Alison’s role and she has hands-on experience in facilitating this.
“I know from experience it is very difficult to get any youngster answering lengthy questionnaires – five questions is generally the maximum they will sit through,” she says.
“Recording impact is so important but it’s an aspect that many community organisations so often overlook due to time pressures and prioritising delivery of sessions. So what I’ve done in the past is approach it in a different way.
“I get young people around a table, buy some pizza and pop, get the brainy evaluation people from the university, a mentor who can break it down and help the young people understand what’s being asked, then just listen. That’s so much more engaging than reading questions off a clipboard before or after a session. Young people give you information quite naturally – and they get their bellies full!”
Alison’s role also encompasses connecting up organisations and individual young people with other local opportunities that will help their personal development.
“It’s just about marrying everything up a little bit better,” she explains. “If a young person has progressed through a project successfully, I might be able to hook them up with their next step through one of my local connections. It’s all about putting the next opportunity in front of them.
“Essentially it’s about supporting each young person in the best way possible. Their needs are at the forefront of it all.”