With a unique arts experience at Manchester’s National Cycling Centre and leaders from the sport visiting our charity’s services to learn more about social care, these experiences powerfully marked British Cycling’s mass day of social impact activity.
The day brought together people supported by our charity, colleagues and members of British Cycling, including British Cycling athletes and legends.
Community great care is one of Britain’s biggest charities and we believe that every person should be able to live their best life possible and one of the ways that we achieve that is by having amazing partnerships with organizations that can achieve social change. British Cycling have got an incredible strategy where they want to deliver real social impact. They want to see society being changed through what is an amazing sport. So to have two organizations that want to achieve the same things, a more inclusive, enabling, and accessible society coming together with shared values and shared missions, we think it’ll be a groundbreaking partnership and today is all about celebrating that. I’ve had a long-standing relationship with community integrated car and the work that they do uh is uh absolutely worldass. uh so we wanted to partner with community education car across all the activities that we’re going to do with our social impact program which is predicated on tackling inequalities to provide opportunities so I think uh singly we are quite powerful uh together uh we are a superpower we were painting with some of the people from community integrated care was great fun yeah I really enjoyed it I was doing the acrylic stencil acrylic yeah it came out brilliant you know it’s like develop new skills and you know like socializing with other people. It’s exactly the same as when we’re in a high performance environment. You know, you need to communicate with each other, you need to share and not be selfish and um yeah, it’s really enjoyable all the fundamentals of being a good team player. So, with the artwork that we create, we’re going to utilize that at our events. So, that may be creating prints that we can then gift to riders at the Lloyds of Britain Men in September. the artwork as gifts to our volunteers to our commercial partners. Typically the people we support will have been in some form of support for all their lives. So quite often they don’t always have a great sense of what’s out there for them. So partnerships like this, days like this just start to open up people’s horizons of there is a world outside that we can explore, that we can engage in, that we can bring our own unique talents and skills to. Don’t matter who you are and they want them to be um involved. Yeah. We don’t want people feel left out and I know how they feel and not nice being left out of you who you are. I think sometimes there’s a misconception with charity partnerships that it is maybe the charity that’s receiving support. But what’s really exciting with this partnership is it’s kind of a strategic dynamic partnership. So community integrated care is one of the largest social care providers in the UK. We deliver services from the top of Scotland down to the south coast of England. So, we’ve got that national infrastructure. Um, but we also have a 40-year history of enabling, inspiring people who draw on social care to live the best lives possible. We’re also going to be working with senior leaders at British Cycling to help co-produce a social impact strategy to look at how their teams can become more inclusive and accessible, their events and the sport. and really just combining the best of social care with cycling to create a really exciting and first of its kind partnership. I think in terms of partnerships that we could form with the Great Britain cycling team, you know, it’s pretty much infinite. Of course, we can invite them to events. We can show them the track nationals just over the roads. We’ve got the Tour of Britain, the women’s tour of Britain, the Tour to France coming in a couple of years. Yeah, I think we can do a lot when we work together. [Music]