Keep Active’s Evolving Impact
Keep Active CIC inspires children, young people, and adults to achieve success through sport, cooking, and creative activities, encouraging healthy and more fulfilled lives. The initiative began in 2011 by supporting disadvantaged children during school holidays, but the team quickly recognised that the community’s needs extended beyond short-term childcare. Keep Active now equips individuals and families in Sunderland with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to lead a healthier lifestyle.
Their mission is to promote wellbeing through sport, fitness, cooking, dance, and creative activities – working across schools, health services, and communities. They deliver a range of inclusive programmes: from Zumba and cooking classes, to mental health support and their hugely popular holiday clubs. Whether it’s helping children stay active during school breaks, supporting teenagers into work, or delivering cooking classes, their approach is underpinned by a commitment to building confidence and improving lives through activity.
Funding
When the pandemic occurred in 2019, Keep Active were running programmes supporting young people across different schools. When schools closed overnight, their delivery also came to a halt, and so it was time to reassess their direction.
“We were very much focused on the age range of probably 5 to 12-year-olds. We now [support people] from 4 to, well, 112 – if you want to be that old and you’re fit enough” says Director Colin Dagg.
That same year Keep Active secured an initial Reach grant which supported this period of reflection and planning and was used to strengthen their internal systems. That support unlocked a further £60,000 in social investment from Big Issue Invest, enabling the team to bring on a new specialist staff member to help them expand their work to new areas including adult wellbeing and mental health support.
The support with financial modelling and business planning was just as important as the funding itself to allow the team to gain a clear understanding of how to grow sustainably in line with their values.
“It’s not all about just getting money and throwing it out the way, saying we’ll just deliver this and have a new impact, whatever. What’s the financial benefit to the organisation? Is it going to allow us to grow? Is it going to help us be bigger and better at what we do? Is it going to highlight our name out there in the community?”
Social impact
The investment enabled Keep Active to bring in specialists with knowledge of youth work, mental health and nutrition. These new skills helped them expand their offer, redesign programmes and respond to wider community needs, embedding mental, physical, and nutritional awareness into their delivery so as to bring about real transformation. Dagg reflects:
“without those people, without that expertise, you’re not really changing people’s lives, you’re just offering something.”
The support also had a powerful effect on the team’s confidence. Dagg says that “one of the biggest things” that the type of support offered by Reach provides is “it gives us belief, because a lot of the time we’re not very good at accepting the work that we do do”. Securing a Reach grant was a powerful affirmation of what Keep Active does and wants to achieve, and of Colin Dagg and his team that are dedicated to doing it.
Receiving social investment has allowed Keep Active to not only see the bigger picture, but investigate the deeper challenges faced by their community, and adapt their model in response. Their impact continues to grow because their programmes meet people where they are, supports them holistically, and helps them to move forward.
