The Change Foundation is the UK’s oldest sport for development charity. We use the power of sport as a tool to support marginalised people through Social Change Coaches with lived experience, providing regular sport, and personalised mentoring.
One of our core focus areas as a charity is providing opportunities for people who have a disability, particularly in and around our local community of Sutton. At our headquarters in Sutton we run a number of programmes for local people with a disability, including TCF United, a youth club for young adults with a disability, and Sports Shift, an adapted sports programme aimed at people who are wheelchair or frame users, and/or have a learning disability, who attend local day centres. We applied to WCGL for funding to incorporate walking into our disability support, as after working with our local communities, we understood that many of them did not have access to the nature in their local area, nor did they feel comfortable accessing it. Following being awarded the grant, the walks have been an incredible success and the people who take part have reaped the rewards that walking provides.
We have organised the walks to ensure they are suitable and inclusive for all the people we support, using local park facilities with a café and ensuring they have accessible parking and toilet facilities. It has been a great pleasure to see people who can often be isolated and have little to no experience of the outdoors enjoy regular leisurely walks where they interact with nature, reap the rewards of physical exercise, engage with one another through conversation and go away with a positive feeling from a sense of fulfilment. We are looking forward to continuing our walks in the future as we have had such positive feedback from the group, and we are looking to explore new accessible walking trails further afield so they experience new environments and challenges.
We are hugely grateful to the WCGL for their support and for giving us the opportunity to run these walks as they have been so successful and beneficial to the vulnerable people in our community. We look forward to continuing to share our successes and explore new ways on how to make our walks better support the marginalised people we serve.