Energise Me and Enable Ability join forces to make activity more accessible

Through Energise YOUth, we teamed up with Enable Ability to launch What’s it like, My Favourite Walk. It aims to help young people living with anxiety and sensory issues to feel more comfortable going out for walks.

Youth Project officer, Emma, tells how the project was a great success. It has led to further work with What’s it Like to make more activities accessible.

My Favourite Walk

In March 2021 we partnered with Enable Ability to fund a “What’s it Like? My Favourite Walk” project.

What’s it Like? uses virtual tours, video walkthrough, and augmented and virtual reality to support people living with anxiety and sensory difficulties. It allows people to see what something is like before they try it. It has been used with great success in the past.  Allowing young people to experience vaccination clinics, CAMHS, a school, a garden centre, and Portsmouth Football Club – amongst many others.

My Favourite Walk aims to provide virtual experiences of walks along Southsea Seafront and around Hayling Island Golf Course. We hoped the experiences would empower disabled people to try these walks. Helping them to grow in confidence walking around their area, and even to upload and share their own favourite walks.

What’s it Like? Disability Cricket

At the same time, in March 2021, we awarded some Investing in Communities funding to Hampshire Cricket Board. The funding was to support the restart of their Disability Cricket programme. Specifically, training sessions and intra-county matches for their Super 9s and D40 players.

Through various conversations, all three partners came together. In May 2021 we awarded funding to support a “What’s It Like? Disability Cricket” project.

Now, anyone wondering about taking part in Super 1s or Super 9s cricket with Hampshire Cricket Board can find various tour videos of the club on the What’s It Like website. The videos include tours of the hubs in various locations, information for parents and players and what a training session is like.

These videos show different players engaging in ways to suit them. You can hear players talking about what they enjoy about cricket, as well as parents sharing their experiences. You can even ‘meet’ some of the coaches!

Empowering people to be active

We hope that both of these projects will help people living with disabilities and conditions, such as anxiety, feel more confident giving activities ago. The last eighteen months have been tough for everyone. The challenges faced by disabled people have been particularly difficult.

Many have been isolated, anxious, and have not been able to be as physically active as they might normally. Supporting Hampshire Cricket Board through our Investing in Communities project, and Enable Ability through our Energise YOUth project has been a great privilege.

We’ve seen disabled people get back to playing the sport they love, and a unique project designed to support people with anxiety and learning disabilities get out and try a walk.  Watching these projects come together has been fantastic!

The virtual tours, video experiences, and interviews that Enable Ability and What’s It Like? have captured will showcase disability cricket to more people. They will help to alleviate anxieties and uncertainties for people wanting to give cricket a go.

With the launch of the We Can Be Active strategy highlighting the importance of “support to help us get started,” we’re delighted to share this project in the hopes that it will inspire more people to try disability cricket. We hope it will also inspire more projects to try innovative ways to alleviate those worries that many people – with and without disabilities – have about trying a new activity.