sporta

Community Fitness, Community Sport, Community Culture

sporta represents social enterprises within the cultural and leisure market across the United Kingdom. Founded in 1997, we have a membership of over 100 leisure trusts and social enterprises, ranging Cornwall to Scotland and from small trusts with single leisure centres to larger organisations managing more than 65 sites. Together the members have a combined annual turnover in excess of £790 million, have more than 175 million customers visiting their facilities each year and employ the equivalent of 21,400 full time employees. Collectively they operate more than 910 individual sites.

All our members are not-for-profit and most are charities with a mission to offer affordable and accessible services and deliver outcomes of local well-being, public health, social cohesion and economic growth. We lead and encourage participation through providing a wide range facilities and programmes for community culture and leisure.

Currrently sporta members are looking to use their experience and strengths to support the new policies for greater local and community decision and delivery of public services; and to contribute to the Olympic Legacy

Are you considering setting up a trust? : If you are a local authority thinking about whether to create a trust to manage culture and leisure facilities we can help provide straightforward advice, including some direct from the experience of existing trust managers.

 Our basic guidance is:

• base your approach to considering the trust option on strategic grounds, not just on financial benefits
• as background, look at the guidance and commentaries which are already available from a number of sources – sporta can help you find some of these which are most relevant for you
• contact us also to see if we can talk you through any points – we should be able to arrange an informal chat or refer you to more formal consultancy assistance
• always take professional advice on what precisely this would mean for your facilities and programmes

want to join sporta? : sporta membership is open to non-profit distributing organisations, primarily but not exclusively those that manage cultural and leisure facilities.

We are a friendly network spread across the whole of the UK, with regular meetings at regional as well as national levels

See also: