Rounding Up a Great Month of Paralympics-themed Inclusive Sport
6th September 2021

In August, we joined in with the excitement around the 2020-21 Paralympics with our very own Inclusive Summer of Sport!

Every year, we run a summer festival, where we get our community together to enjoy lots of fun activities – but this year, we decided to expand the festival to the whole summer!

We transformed our summer Community Clubs into Paralympic-themed hubs, and ran several partner events across London, including our Wandsworth Paralympics sessions, Tower Hamlets kids’ club, and para-swimming event with Swim England.

Towards the end of the month, we also held a Virtual Inclusive Sport Festival for those of us who still prefer to stay at home.

These fun two days of online sessions included dance, multisports and boxing, along with creative activities such as flatbread pizza cook-along – where we saw some amazing cookery skills in action! We were delighted to be joined by para-athlete Shaun White and GB badminton player, Sharon Jones Barnes in our opening and closing ceremonies.

We also held two panel sessions for the sports industry – one where bloggers Shona Louise and Dee Reilly shared their experiences of building digital communities to raise disability awareness, and another with speakers from the Activity Alliance, Loughborough University and Accessercise app – focusing on the role of community in making sport inclusive.

But it wasn’t just about the Paralympics – our Inclusive Summer of Sport was also about celebrating the grassroots disability sport community and showing how getting active together – whether in person or from home – can keep us connected, resilient and positive.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at any of our Inclusive Summer of Sport sessions. If you enjoyed the events and would like to donate to our charity to help us run more activities like this, you can do so here.

We hope you have been enjoying Paralympic season and will continue to be inspired by inclusive sport throughout the year!