Jaspal Gill, Campaign Lead at Southall Active Communities, has told us about her team’s plans for making the residents of Southall both mentally and physically healthier - including how the Ad-Lib Training Outdoor Activator course is supporting them to engage more Southall residents in physical activity.
Q. What is your job role?
I’m the Head of Delivery for the Active Communities team which is part of Ealing Council. We are a campaigning team, commissioned by Sport England to run health campaigns around getting more people active in Southall.
Q. What are the objectives of the Active Communities team?
The campaigns are bespoke to Southall - using baseline survey data we know that there are high levels of inactivity in Southall. Using funding from the Sport England Local Delivery pilot, we aim to build local leadership and social movement and believe that people coming together makes getting active easier. We encourage our community to think about their local area, how to use their local networks and resources with the aim to shift power to them to ensure the sustainability of the physical activity intervention.
Q. How is Ad-Lib Training helping you to achieve your objective of getting more people active in Southall?
The Ad-Lib Training Outdoor Activator training has given confidence to our Organisers (activity leaders). It helped to cement what I already knew about the strategies my team need to use to engage the community in physical activity – activity opportunities should be pitched at everyone’s level e.g. gateway and non-traditional activities.
By attending the training, the team have confidence around the skills they need to deliver e.g. being a presence in the park, organising and leading activity, engaging the community and animating the space. The training was also useful as it provided understanding around how to deliver and engage differently when you do not know who your audience is going to be on any given session whilst reinforcing the value of our open space.
The Course Tutor, Robin, was very adaptable and created an inclusive learning environment for our Organisers. His expertise in this area shone through and he had a magnetic feel to get the students on board. I felt he connected to and had the right mindset for our objectives - what it means to get people in the community active.
Q. What’s next for the Active Communities team?
The Organisers are now leading community sessions and their next task is to build a programme which enables any member of the community who wants to do an outdoor gym workout to take part in a session. We would also like to expand this programme to every park in Southall, building leadership capacity in the community.
