Throughout 2020 Cara has been successfully piloting Xcessible LSP/NGB Bronze Award with seven organisations; Basketball Ireland, Swim Ireland, Badminton Ireland, Cycling Ireland, Mayo LSP, Clare LSP & Kildare LSP.
Building a strong foundation for inclusion and nurturing the relationships with the Local Sports Partnerships (LSPs) and National Governing Bodies of Sport (NGBs) has always been a priority for Cara. Xcessible has been developed to help support and empower LSPs & NGBs to positively and meaningfully provide opportunities for people with disabilities to take part, sustain participation and excel in sport and physical activity. Through the Xcessible Award, Cara supported and guided the 7 NGBs & LSPs to create more opportunities through coaching, participation, volunteering, officiating, and high performance while building a strong strategic platform for inclusion within each of the organisations.
Xcessible is three staged resourced pathway designed to ease an NGB or LSP into the area of Inclusion and support them through the process of developing and increasing their capacity to support people with disabilities within the sport and physical activity environments. The main purpose of the programme is to enable NGBs & LSPs to function inclusively with limited support from specialist agencies and to enable them to realise their vision of inclusion and to understand & reflect on their current provisions and philosophy of inclusion for people with disabilities. The next stage in the journey for these organisations will be to progress to the silver award in 2021 and onwards eventually to achieve gold recognition.
Xcessible has been developed by using the Sport Inclusion Disability Charter as a guiding tool. The seven organisations were guided through the bronze award under the headings of Openness, People, Activities, Facilities, and Promotion supported by Cara through each area and set realistic and manageable goals and deadlines.
Each organisation was required to provide evidence of their work and journey and presented to the Xcessible panel at the end of November on their experiences, results, and outcomes of their work completed in line with the objectives of the Xcessible Award.
Congratulations to Clare LSP, Mayo LSP, Kildare LSP & Basketball Ireland who have achieved bronze status for the Xcessible Award in 2020, we look forward to continuing to support Badminton Ireland, Swim Ireland & Cycling Ireland to complete their final few tasks on their Xcessible Bronze journey and to achieve bronze status in early 2021.
Reflecting on the success of Xcessible Cara’s Strategic Operations Manager Brenda O’Donnell said:
‘On behalf of Cara I want to thank the 7 Organisations involved in the Xcessible Bronze Award pilot programme this year, 2020 has been a challenging year for everyone involved in the sector, and we very much value the commitment, vision, and passion shown by each of the organisations through this phase of their Xcessible journey. We have observed some outstanding positive cultural, policy,and practice changes from each of the Organisations involved in the bronze award in relation to supporting people with disabilities to get involved and stay involved in sport and physical activity. We look forward to supporting these organisations on the next stage of their journey while also supporting a new cohort of organisations onto the Xcessible Bronze Award programme in 2021.’
