Rejuvenating Sport In The Community

Local Leagues Ltd is a voluntary (not-for-profit) organisation based in Balsall Heath, founded by local residents in 1996 to provide organised sustainable sport and recreational activities for children and their families living in deprived communities across Birmingham. Local Leagues’ aim is to provide young people from inner city areas of Birmingham between the ages of 7 and 16, with interesting, exciting, supervised, structured and sustained physical activities that take place within walking distance of their homes. In doing so, Local Leagues' aims to impact upon the physical and social health and well-being of the community it serves and hance addressing social issues before they arise. To this aim, Local Leagues also pro-actively work to train coaches from the local communities to play an integral part in the delivery of this concept. We aim to create a coherent sports, leisure and recreation strategy for young people and provide constructive environments in which they can develop social and personal skills, and direct their raw energies into positive means.

Local Leagues has been instrumental in raising the profile of sport and the social and health benefits sport has to offer in developing cohesive communities. Local Leagues works towards the ethos of “Sport For All” in the belief that this will create more harmonious and unified communities and our ideology has developed on from a successful pilot project called “Sport In The Community” through which Undergraduate students from Birmingham’s three universities volunteer their leisure time to assist school P.E. Coordinators and provide extra curricular sports coaching and elementary skills training.