Community Fun Days

Keeping active through partnership working and community consultation

An Active Shetland Working Group including members of Shetland Islands Council, sportscotland, Shetland Recreational Trust, NHS Shetland, Ability Shetland and ZetTrans have been focusing on supporting the inactive to become active. As reported in the last Annual Report, the group carried out a local survey to help identify barriers to participation and came up with five actions to help reduce them.

One action is to create family-orientated and fun-focused activities for all in two rural areas. The areas identified through the survey as particularly in need were South Mainland and Mossbank. Community Fun Days were organised in both with the aim of offering a varied fun day for all ages, with an opportunity to engage with locals through a survey and discussions to find out more about what they would like to see in their areas.

Both days were successful with exciting programmes of activities and good turnouts from the local communities. The Fun Days involved various activities such as archery, football, book bug, teas, music, crafts, outdoor games, swimming, duck races and sportswear ‘Kit For All’ items to take home.

Feedback from the Mossbank Fun Day showed the community wanted more of this type of event, where local partners come together to deliver free activities for families. Three more family fun days have been organised for the summer holidays, with a view to expanding offers in the future. Feedback for the South Mainland event showed that 85% wanted to be more active and family sessions were the most popular activity that they would like to see offered. When asked what would help people to become more active, the most selected answer was ‘family focused sessions’ followed by ‘safer walking and cycling routes’. This feedback will be used by partners in the local area to discuss and develop future ideas.

This contributes to all the Partnership priorities; with communities influencing decisions that affect them; people benefitting from living in active communities and positive places; and the events being free means that cost is not a barrier. It is hoped that this type of work will increase the percentage of people who feel they can influence decisions affecting their own area, people in Shetland who feel part of their community, and people engaging in physical activity.