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Active Community Clubs

Founded in 2001 in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, the Active Community Clubs initiative focuses on building local capacity through activities designed and owned by the community, with the goal of achieving ‘increased capacity to deliver inclusive sports-based programs that contribute to social development’.

The aim of the Active Community Clubs program is to ‘provide opportunities for children and young people to participate in regular quality physical activities, in clubs which are owned and run by community members’.

The program is supported through funding from the Australian Sports Outreach Program and is currently delivered in Botswana, the Republic of South Africa and Swaziland.

There are also other programs that stem from the Active Community Clubs initiative, which are based in Papua New Guinea, the Caribbean and Malawi, and receive support from the Australian government.

More information on Active Community Clubs is provided in the An Impact Study on the Australia–Africa 2006 Sport Development Programme available at the bottom of this page.

Structure

Active Community Clubs are designed to improve the physical and social health of communities through participation in physical activities. The key word is ‘active’: community members become more physically active through their involvement in sport, recreation and cultural activities, and the community as a whole becomes more active in taking control of its future.

An Active Community Club is a place where people can access physical and social activities through sports, games and learning.

Active Community Clubs are set up to:

• be a fun place where there are sports and games for children, young people and adults
• provide physical activities close to home
• help people get fit and healthy
• help people make friends
• make a better community
• build leadership skills.
  

An Activity Community Club is designed and owned by the community.

Partners

The Active Community Clubs program is supported by Imvomvo Training and Management Services (South Africa), Botswana National Sports Council and the strategic alliance between the Swaziland Olympic and Commonwealth Games Association and Swaziland National Sports Council.

Participation

Active Community Clubs act as a catalyst in mobilising community resources and capabilities. They offer sporting opportunities to disadvantaged communities and encourage broad participation by offering activities to boys and girls (aged five to 15) with different sporting abilities.

Active Community Clubs offer a central point of contact and access to the community, and have the potential to reduce the unnecessary duplication of resources. An Active Community Club can also assist in the coordination of community needs-based initiatives, including HIV/AIDS and health education, music, drama, kitchen gardens, early childhood facilities and more.

The Active Community Clubs program facilitates:

• popular sports, such as rugby, cricket, netball, football (soccer), tennis, volleyball, swimming, netball, athletics
  
• physical activities such as dancing, and indigenous and modified games.
  

Implementation

An Active Community Club is established through a rigorous 12-step process, during which community members are highly involved in consultation, planning, implementation and assessing their community’s delivery capabilities.

Development tools used to assist in starting and running an Active Community Club initiative include:

• Active Community Club Resource Kit and training
• Pacific Junior Sport Program
• Africa Sports Ability Program
• Sport-in-development Impact Assessment Tool (SDIAT) developed by the University of Johannesburg
• Participatory Action Research Training (PART) developed by the University of Johannesburg.
  

Once a club is established there is a three-level strategy to promote ownership and club sustainability:

• community — clubs are encouraged to engage with children and youth, parents, elderly citizens, and people with special needs (for example, people living with a disability or with HIV/AIDS). The clubs are supported in setting up committees that will be active in mobilising networks and developing delivery systems, which operate using existing resources
• regional — clubs are encouraged to register as not-for-profit organisations to access grants and other forms of support
• national — the Active Community Club centres in each country are encouraged to establish advisory networks to help tap into resources which can enhance implementation, capacity delivery and sustainability. These networks expand each club’s knowledge base so they can strengthen their delivery within existing systems.