Move More Empowered communities wants to support communities to move more where they live. By doing this, we want to understand the approaches that are most likely to make this work, what helps, and what doesn’t.

Move More Empowering Communities (MMEC) project aimed to support voluntary, community, faith, and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations across Sheffield work with communities with the lowest levels of physical activity. The aim was to work with these communities to understand what works to enable physical activity at a local level, what factors affect this, and ultimately enable more people to be active in ways and places that suit them. We have been working on this project from Apr ’19 to Aug ‘22.

In the Empowered Communities project, we wanted to look at what worked well and support the things, places, and people who do provide physical activity opportunities to grow. Or, try to introduce physical activity elements to things, places, or people who don't do physical activity already but do support people in other ways.

We want to build capacity in community organisations and capabilities in individuals so they can

• Tell us and the system about local physical activity and where the difficulties and opportunities lie.

• Nurture and expand the good stuff that exists already

• Deliver community health, wellbeing and physical activity assets at neighbourhood level.

Getting a good understanding and of this will allow us and other across the city to use investment wisely and effectively by strengthening roles and adding value in the right places.

Our partners at SHU are leading a robust evaluation of this work to capture the learning and develop theories that can guide other physical activity work across the city and wider. Check out the final report below and also two of the 6 month reports carried out during the project on learning and impact from the Move More Empowered Communities work.

As part of this work we have been working with communities to identify the assets within their community have worked alongside some of the local organisations to produce the maps below.

Move More Communities is delivered by Voluntary Action Sheffield, in partnership with a number of voluntary and community sector organisations, NCSEM, and funded by Sport England.