Launching Together For Sport, and taking inspiration from Megan Rapinoe
This week we launched a project to make it easy to share sports kit, so having the right kit is never a barrier to getting involved.
I wrote earlier this week about a talk on frugal innovation by Charles Leadbeater.
One of the things he explores in the talk is where future social innovations are most likely to come from.
He suggests that many big innovations are most likely to come from rooted cosmpolitans — grassroots entrepreneurs working in one place, but taking inspiration from wherever they can find it.
In the social enterprise that I help to run, we are increasingly interested in the power of place-based, grassroots action.
It’s a theme we’ve explored in detail over the last couple of years, working with The RSA on their Regenerative Futures programme —on our Leeds Fashion Futures project.
How can you take big ideas — like circular economy — and apply them in one place — so that they are meaningful to people in their daily lives?
That inspired us to think about how to explore themes around the climate impacts of clothing, by looking back at the rich history in Leeds in relation to clothing and textiles — including through creating a Leeds Textile Trail.
It also informed our Zero Waste Clothing campaign — helping people to understand where the climate impacts emerge right across the clothing supply chain — whilst focusing in on what people can do, right here in Leeds.
It’s also made us think really hard about how we can make a difference in our city.
Leeds School Uniform Exchange is the best example of this — combining both a desire to reduce clothing waste and a clear focus on making it as easy as possible for people to get hold of good quality, free school uniform.
So being rooted in a place matters to us a lot.
The cosmpolitan bit matters too. We take inspiration from wherever we can find it — and there is so much we can learn from elsewhere, from frugal innovators around the globe for example.
And inspiration can sometimes be found in places you don’t expect.
I’m not a regular reader of Glamour magazine. And at the time I’m not sure I was that aware of who Megan Rapinoe is. But someone shared her acceptance speech at the Women of The Year Awards in 2019 and it was one of the most powerful 5 minute speeches I’ve seen in a long time.
Megan Rapinoe's Acceptance Speech - Women of the Year 2019
I feel like I have to take this opportunity to thank the person for whom I don't feel like I would here without…www.glamour.com
There’s one section in particular that really struck a chord:
“She [Her mum] taught us that in kindness and in caring and in giving a sh!t and sharing, that’s abundance.
That’s the kinda culture that we want to live in.
I feel like we live in this sort of scarcity type culture.
One of my best friends always says that and that’s not the world I wanna live in.
I think we can move on from losing alone to the belief in winning together and with that abundance in mind, I wanna re-imagine what it means to be successful, what it means to have influence, what it means to have power and what that all looks like.”
A culture of abundance, not scarcity.
We take inspiration from this in our work at Zero Waste Leeds — specifically in relation to seeing resources rather than waste — and thinking about how those resources can be kept in circulation for longer, and shared across our city.
We ask ourselves, how can we nurture a spirit of generosity?
You’ll see that in practice in Leeds School Uniform Exchange, with close to 100 community-led exchanges up and running right across Leeds.
And it’s inspired a new project that we’ve launched this week, one that we think Megan Rapinoe would be particularly keen on — Together For Sport.
Together For Sport builds upon the success of our school uniform exchange project, with the aim of making it easy to share sports kit — so that not having the right kit is never a barrier to getting involved.
We’ve set up a Facebook group to encourage people to ask for and offer sports kit — and we’ll also be working with clubs across Leeds to help them to promote what they’re doing to ensure access to the right kit isn’t a barrier to young people getting involved.
Kitting out your child for a new sport or activity can be expensive — particularly when you’re not 100% sure they’ll stick long-term with the new activity they’re keen to try out.
And kit is often in good quality — as I was reminded recently when I found various pairs of football boots that my son had grown out of.
I gave them a clean, shared them on social media and found a local community group who were looking for boots for young people.
The idea of Together For Sport is to get that kind of sharing happening right across our city — and for clubs in Leeds to encourage sharing so that it just becomes the normal thing to do —so no child in Leeds ever feels they can’t get involved because they don’t have the right kit.
Generosity, abundance, circularity — whatever you want to call it, we’ll do all we can to encourage more of it.