Greater Manchester Moving Strategy Refresh 2021 – GM Moving in Action

By GreaterSport | 13 January 2021 | TAGS: GM Moving, strategy

Why a GM Moving Refresh at this point?

A refresh of GM Moving is planned for 2021. We need to refresh, refocus, re-energise and adapt our collective approach in the context of the pandemic, inequalities and for the long term future.

The Journey and Learning

When the GM Moving Plan was launched in 2017, there was a commitment to a refresh in 2021 to help keep guiding us on our journey to the 2025 ambition. As we have collectively worked to engage people in active lives over the past 3 years, we have been on a continual learning journey; evaluating and gaining a better understanding of how change happens in complex systems. We are learning more about why and how we need to lead together, to keep growing a movement and enable more people to live active lives.

In summer 2020, we paused to look back, learn, and vision the future of GM Moving. The look forward is in the context of the ongoing Sport England Strategy engagement, the GM Covid Recovery and Resilience Plan, the emerging national strategy, the emerging Population Health Plan and Greater Manchester Strategy.

In August, the GM Moving Executive Group started engagement with system-wide partners to shape thinking for this GM Moving refresh. Conversations are continuing across the system, and emerging evaluation findings are helping to consider the art of the possible for the future.

Building on our Strengths

There are strengths in the approach of the past three years. We have much to build on:

• A shared vision, ambition and purpose.
• An alignment and mutually reinforcing set of outcomes that support a healthier, happier more productive Greater Manchester.
• Greater Manchester’s ‘People Power.’ People in communities, and system leaders who are fundamental to supporting active lives from neighbourhoods to town halls in every locality.
• A growing understanding of how we can collectively enable culture change, system change and behaviour change.
• Alignment of GM Moving to national, regional and local strategies and direction of travel.
• Strategic commitment across the GM system and a belief that moving matters to us all.
• Solid principles and ways of working that guide our approach.
• A growing understanding of the leadership behaviours that support positive change.
• A growing understanding of how to ‘measure what matters’.

Confronting Reality and Refocussing

There is also a need to consider where we haven’t made as much collective progress as we would have hoped, and of course, to confront the realities of the pandemic and the impact it is having.

The purpose of this refresh is to refocus and re-energise, ensuring greater and more diverse engagement in active lives; across GM, localities and neighbourhoods.

There is a need to reposition GM Moving in the new national, regional and local context to ensure that together we keep creating the conditions for the movement to grow.

It is also about confronting the realities of where we have gaps, challenges, blockages and barriers to change.

Key to the next chapter in the GM Moving story are the following priorities:

 Together we need to:

• Keep building on the shared purpose, growing it in every place, so that moving matters to everyone.
• Focus our efforts on addressing inequalities in activity that were already there, and that are growing during the pandemic.
• Ensure that we use a lens of universal and targeted policy and practice in everything we do.
• Work now in ways that enable future generations of GM people to flourish.
• Play our full part in a low carbon, green GM.
• Be honest about what is getting in the way of progress; step forward, lead on the difficult issues and work together to unlock culture and system change.
• Building leadership capacity and capability of people, communities and leaders in all our localities and across sectors.
• Find ways to make our shared learning, working, progress and stories visible and accessible to all to support and inspire mutual support, challenge, trust, courage and the continued translation into practice across the system.
• Identify gaps in system and place engagement in this agenda, prioritise and invest in a system engagement, participation and influencing approach that enables people to find shared purpose in the outcomes that matter to each other and do the work together for mutual benefit.

What is important in the wider context?

1. National Context - Sport England Strategy, national Obesity Strategy
2. GM Context- Recovery and Resilience Plan, Population Health Plan, GM Strategy, Mayoral Elections 2021.
3. Locality and Neighbourhood Context- articulation of how moving matters to each locality and the approach in each place

Where next? (Dec 2020-July2021)

People own what they create. The journey to develop GM Moving in Action is as important as the tangible output of the process. Together, we will develop GM Moving in Action that provides information, shares learning, provides assets and tools for people across GM to lead GM Moving where they are.

We want your input

We are already having conversations and talking to partners across the GM system about what matters to them and we want everyone to have the opportunity to contribute. We will be providing a space online for people to input their thoughts soon and will be letting people know via our newsletter when this is live. If you are not signed up to the newsletter please do so here to be notified.

Please complete our survey here and help shape GM Moving In Action – a strategy for the next decade.