Make Change - Club of the Month, July 2023

For July's #EveryBodyMoves Club of the Month award we travelled to the ARK Victoria Academy in Birmingham to see how Make Change our delivering on their mission to bring inclusive and adaptive sports to new areas of the country.

Founded by Jay Popat and Andy Craddock following the COVID-19 pandemic, where the team knew firsthand the devastating impact that the lock downs and regulations would have on activity opportunities for the disabled community. They identified what support people would need in order to return to sport and physical activity, and how they could play a key role in helping a community rebuild and come back stronger.

"The main aim of Make Change is to bring inclusive sport to people, to be able to give an example of what inclusivity and adaptive sports is."

Jay Popat told the Every Body Moves team... and he's right! The organisation have been proactively delivering adaptive sport experiences in a variety of locations since their inception, many where adaptive sports may not have been considered prior to Make Change's involvement. They do so in a way that challenges people's perceptions of what sports they might expect to see at events or sports/activity days, making the inclusion of wheelchair basketball and others alongside non-disabled a regular occurence.

Jay went on to say. "It started off with ten chairs. We now have about 106 sports chairs. We do archery, we do boxing. We do inclusive football, rugby league, you name it. We bring adaptive sport, inclusive sport to wherever we need to be."

"Our niche is that we're able to just play with the barriers, find a solution in a cooperative way, co-created with the the participant, and make it so that they can enjoy the activity that way they want to play."

The event Every Body Moves attended with Make Change, was the Ark Victoria Academy's Summer Fete. Welcoming a truly diverse demographic of families from the local area, all taking part in the adaptive activities on offer. The academy also prides itself on inclusive and adaptive sport forming part of the curriculum as Principal Ela McSorely told us. "It is really important for us as a school that we do
celebrate a range of different types of activities, a range of different skills and talents, and that we can actually draw our community... 

... There are many things that I think we could teach people about, just by experiencing adaptive sport or experiencing sport in a different way."

This rang true as we spoke with young participants, many of whom saw inclusive participation with disabled and non-disabled people together as simply 'participation'.  Someone championing that message of inclusion and helping low socioeconomic participation, is Asma Ajaz-Ali. A volunteer with Make Change who also works England Squash, she told us...

"I think when you've got communities such as inner-city Birmingham, where cost of living crisis is literally so, so severe for them. When you look at sport it’s normally the first thing that’s taken away. But here with the adaptable sport and Make Change, how we operate is to make things free."

This all forms part of Make Change's mission to find novel and co-produced ways to remove the barriers to participation in adaptive and inclusive sport, and indeed why we selected them for our club of the month. A huge congratulations again to Jay, Andy and the rest of the team for a thoroughly deserved award win.