Dale Gamble attended North East Sport Welfare Event RISE

St James Park Newcastle on Saturday 6th June

Over 150 sport volunteers from across 40 different sports attended  from the North East learning, sharing ideas and connecting.There were  inspirational key-note speakers and expert workshop deliverers to help increase your knowledge in a range of sport welfare topics.

Amjid Khazir (Media Cultured) kicked off the event with an insightful talk about how the power of sport promotes social unity, exploring how we can address Islamophobia, racism, and antisemitism through effective diversity education and safeguarding programmes. He discussed the role sports organisations can play, the practical improvements they can make, and how national and local clubs can better equip their leaders, young people, and their wider communities drawing upon his work with England Hockey, the ECB, the Premier League, and the UN, including current challenges such as harmful online narratives.

Then Clarke Carlisle, former Premier League footballer, award-winning broadcaster and advocate of mental health in sport as a proud ambassador for MIND and the Samaritans. Clarke spoke to us about his lived experience and challenges in mental health throughout his sporting career to present day and explore what we can do to support our members.

After lunch I attended two workshops delivered by local experts :

Safeguarding adults in sport : this gave the key differences from safeguarding in adults to children

Online harms and AI : new laws that were introduced last month, sending false information indented to cause non-trivial harm, threatening commutations and image abuse

All though I attended as the Governing Body Head, I had the opportunity to hear from sports clubs in the North East about the things they’re doing to create safer and more inclusive cultures at their clubs, which gave a insight into other sports and there practices. The use of Sport80 came into conversation and the ease of getting everyone to get registrations, Codes of practices and documents in place.