COMMUNITY • COMMUNITY

Targeted Projects 2023

At Life Leisure, our Active Communities team run a wide range of projects and services to encourage and support people in increasing physical activity levels. As well as our larger projects such as Smile, I Wish I’d Tried and R-Time, the Active Communities team also run a number of smaller targeted projects that we deliver and support.

The Targeted Projects work with various people and we will continue to work with current and new partner organisations and groups to help support more areas and residents in our communities.

Stockport Moving Together (SMT)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on our freedom and the way we live our lives. As society moved through a phased recovery period, Life Leisure and the Stockport Council worked hard to ensure that Stockport residents, especially those who have been most disadvantaged by COVID-19, were helped to re-engage back into their communities safely through a programme of physical activity interventions. Never before has this been as important for the physical and mental health of the people of Stockport.

The programme SMT consisted of a range of projects that catered to the needs of residents and developed into a support network of organisations to support physical activity. This includes localised activities delivered by Life Leisure’s SMILE and PARiS initiatives, the development of booklets guiding people through a range of exercises and the specialist projects with a variety of partners including GPs and Primary Care in Stockport, Stockport CCG, Stepping Hill NHS Foundation Trust. It forms part of the broader One Stockport campaign, which will allow the borough to ‘build back better’ in response to the virus.

SMT resulted in:

  • Creation of SMILE activity packs for Borough Care Ltd.
  • Marketing and communication planning for the campaign attached to One Stockport.
  • Regular planning group meetings every week to expand on recovery work.
  • 140 activity packs throughout the winter 2020/2021 delivered to residents in Brinnington, Reddish and Offerton as well as through the COVID-19 recovery team within the NHS.

Future:

When we began moving forward from the pandemic, simultaneously the refreshed Active Communities Strategy was released, which was publicly branded as SMT. SMT aims to pull together all the great work that is happening across the borough to make active lives a possibility for all residents.