The Birmingham Community Paddle Sports Project

The Birmingham Community Paddle Sport hubs are an innovation driven by Olympic canoeist Andy Train and supported by Paddle UK in partnership with the Canal & River Trust and StreetGames. The project attempts to reach into the most underserved communities, increase access and encourage participation in paddle sport across Birmingham’s canal network. June 2022 to July 2023 was about capacity building. 2024 is about community reach and repeating the opportunity for another cohort of young people to participate via the summer holiday programme.

So, the opportunity to carry out more research to assess reach, impact and wellbeing is timely. Amongst the 1.1 million population of Birmingham, only a small proportion of residents have historically taken part in paddle sport activities based on the city’s extensive canal network. The reasons are complex but include concerns for personal safety and fear of criminal activity in the inner city. But more significantly, a lack of role models, ownership and sense of belonging that local people are entitled to use those green and blue spaces has resulted in limited access and an underrepresentation in paddle sport on Birmingham’s canals.
Supported by Paddle UK, Canal and River Trust and StreetGames, the project received £100k in funding during 2023.

This collaboration, or system change approach, has enabled the rapid development of eight community organisations to build capacity and add paddle sport to their local youth, community and family offerings.
By taking this approach, paddle sport is now reaching deep into local communities with a wide range of ethnic and social diversity. So, people who otherwise would not be accessing the water are now taking up paddling for the first time and being coached, helmed and organised by local people in locally trusted organisations (LTOs) within their own community. A truly place-based approach.

Paddle UK sought to evaluate the impact of this initiative and recognised that StreetGames possesses significant expertise in research and insight. Consequently, the two organisations joined forces, with StreetGames taking the lead in formulating research questions, survey formats, and subsequent report generation. Paddle UK provided funding for local coordination to facilitate the survey implementation once again in 2024, with the primary objective of optimizing response rates by ensuring that participants and project leaders completed the surveys promptly.

In this way StreetGames plugged the Birmingham paddle sport initiative into the city-wide Holiday Activity and Food (HAF) programme that reaches 10’s of thousands of children annually via more than 350 local HAF providers. Building on the success of last year, this summer another 29 HAF providers attempted to introduce over 1,000 young people to the sport across the eight hubs by offering more than 50 bell boat paddle sessions.

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