Here at Inclusive Sports Academy, we have six fundamental values that we apply to each and every aspect of our work. This is in order to deliver the most honest and engaging session to everyone who attends, and also make sure we are always remaining true to our brand.
We feel as though these six values massively represent who we are and what we do, and today we are going to go into a little more detail on how we implement them to every different aspect of Inclusive Sports Academy’s sessions. Our first value is of course: Inclusivity It’s in the title! Of course our first value is inclusivity. This to us means being inclusive to everyone no matter their ability, race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. We want to always be a safe and open environment in which everyone feels valued, appreciated and heard. We also want to be able to provide opportunities to individuals who may otherwise be excluded within both our workplace and sessions. Of course, ensuring that everyone’s disability is catered to and understood is at the forefront of our priorities during all of our sessions. This also includes understanding what ratio of trained staff to participants we need in order for our sessions to be safe for everyone involved. As well as this, making sure that all of our venues are accessible and disability friendly. We also adapt activities in order to make them accessible, for example, our PA sessions. We make sure that everything we do during the sessions are adapted in order to make situations that may not always be disability friendly available to our participants, who also may not have had the opportunity to do so before. 2nd: Respect Again, this value expands across everything we do, and includes absolutely everyone! Everyone deserves respect, no matter what and we make sure that we deliver our sessions, interact with everyone and create an office culture that is based around mutual respect. We will also interact and engage with all of our participants and employees with respect, but also we recognise that respecting the expectations, wishes and boundaries of our participants is extremely important. We will always be discreet and understanding in any situation, no matter how difficult or awkward it can sometimes be! Overall, we believe that creating a culture of overall mutual respect will usually create a tighter knit group that people want to work for and visit. 3rd: Positivity We like to think that we tackle every single situation with a positive attitude. Sometimes it can be hard, but making sure that we are staying positive can often help create an overall optimistic outcome! We have a history of not letting the odds get us down- for example, in lockdown! Instead of giving in and remaining negative, we approached sessions with Zoom and even equipment drop offs, which in the end massively benefited our audience and helped them remain positive, as well as us! We use any misfortunes that come our way as learning curves that can create new and innovative opportunities to adapt our services. We will reflect and try to understand why, and then implement processes that will ensure it will not happen a second time. This has made for an overall much more effective workplace process, and a lot less room for mistakes. However, we also believe that mental health is so important, and sometimes you can’t always be positive! Therefore not forcing positivity onto a high pressure and difficult situation is also something that we believe in! It’s okay not to be okay sometimes. 4th: Loyalty We will always remain loyal to our participants, who are the reason that we do what we do! We will always work to be on your side and do what we can to help you have the most fun, safe and inclusive experience whenever anyone is in our care. We also remain loyal to our amazing staff, who we have full faith and trust in to deliver the most amazing services. We love to internally promote and recruit, and will give work opportunities to our own staff before searching externally. Much like our value of partnership, we also remain committed to loyally helping and supporting everyone else in the community! Whether it is sharing our knowledge or utilising their services- we will always go local first! 5th: Partnership We will always try to prioritise local businesses for all of our services, as we believe that partnership in the local community is so important. For example, if we must source catering- we go to the local community cafe Three Beans or Bailey’s! Partnership with other CICs in order to share our thoughts, ideas and funding pots is also an extremely important to us- as after all, we are a community interest company! This means that community is always at the heart of everything that we do, and helping out anywhere we can is also a priority. Of course, partnering with plenty of amazing organisations that supply generous funding to us (all which can be found on our partner sites!) is the most important thing of all, as without this… we would be unable to run any services at all! Our funding is imperative to having the resources we require to run all of our projects, so valuing those who we do work with is so important to us! 6th: Good Stewardship Good stewardship ensures that all of our resources and equipment are always in the highest condition before we allow our participants to use them. As well as this, they are relevant and accessible to our participants who may struggle to operate certain toys and activities. This is done by our equipment being regularly checked, cleaned and monitored before being taken to any of our sessions. We also make sure that everything is risk assessed, suitable and age appropriate for our participants. So of course not only is our good stewardship to reflect Inclusive Sports as a company, but also to make sure that all of our participants remain happy and safe.
Of course we believe that these values should be kept to every single day no matter what, however we also believe that every company should also have a set of core values to stick by. Do you have any that you like to abide by at your workplace, or just in life anyway? We would absolutely love to know, so drop them in the comments section below!