Bringing students together with local communities to address well-being

‘Taking Part’ is Cardiff Met’s strategy for sport, health and well-being which sets out its ambitions for becoming a world-leading healthy university. Overall, Cardiff Met wants to enable students, staff and external communities to become healthier, stronger and more sustainable when they engage with the institution. Cardiff Met achieves this through innovative programmes, two examples are:

Community Days
Creating a sense of belonging and focus on both the Llandaff and Cyncoed campuses, the popular community days bring together the local community, businesses, suppliers, staff, students and visitors to engage with a variety of sustainable themes.

Taking place once a month on campus, the community days were developed from an initial link with a local Farmers’ Market, and have grown into a meaningful community event, with clear branding and messaging to identify the event to key people. Led by the community, the content and structure evolves based on the ideas and feedback from everyone involved.

The range of activities on the day have included community litter picks, free bike MOTs provided by a local charity, waste collection awareness from Cardiff Council, Fairtrade University promotions, as well as showcasing active travel /exercise available through local sports clubs, gyms and transport providers.

Sport Cardiff
Sport Cardiff is the city’s sport development team based at Cardiff Met. Sport Cardiff delivers a comprehensive and innovative programme of activities to ensure everyone in the city can have a lifelong enjoyment of sport and physical activity. Projects include:

• Inspiring inclusive school sport and physical activity programmes such as the Cardiff Games and Open Campus which last year collectively engaged with over 11,000 young people.
• Reducing the gaps in participation created by disadvantage and inequality by providing programmes such as swimming lessons for refugees and asylum seekers which also supported community integration and cohesion.
• The #INNERSTRENGTH programme for inactive teenage girls which increased confidence by 88% and physical activity levels by 100% – with 20% of the girls now meeting WHO guidelines for physical activity.
• Enhancing a thriving network of sports clubs and a vibrant workforce to ensure clubs are equipped to sustain a physical active city with projects such as Boxing for Better Mental Health.

Promoting well-being, optimism and ambition in deprived rural areas

Under the Bridge aims to address elements of deprivation such as poor health, by providing opportunities to promote an active life style and general health and mental well-being by engaging young people in alternative forms of art, media and dance which they may not otherwise easily access.

The project also aims to address community safety by engaging young people in diversionary activities and raise a positive profile of young people in Milford Haven.

The project is a targeted detached youth provision for young people aged 11-18 from Milford Haven, the project aims to cover five key topics (health and wellbeing, safety, perception of crime, anti-social behaviour and promoting skills and learning).

Under the Bridge aimed to provide young people in Milford Haven with engaging activities during the summer holidays when statutory youth services do not provide open access provisions, using detached youth work methodology in an area where young people regularly congregate. Furthermore, a key priority was to tackle anti-social behaviour by co-ordinating diversionary activities around Milford Haven.

The programme engaged with over 191 individuals participate in the programme and 368 contacts were made in total over the lifetime of the project.  In addition, 3 young people who attended recorded over 30 hours of volunteering hours within their community.  The ambition is for the project to continue within 2020 but expand the number of sessions we provided in this format. In addition to this we look to expand and develop the Youth Ambassador Scheme.