Steps to success!
A year after bringing healthy short walks to the doorsteps of England’s inner-city residents, Andrew McCloy finds out how the Ramblers’ Get Walking Keep Walking project has changed lives
When I’m walking I feel much happier and forget all my worries.” It’s a sentiment that many of us share, but for this particular woman from inner-city Manchester it has been something of a revelation. She was part of a group of south Asian women who took part in the Ramblers’ Get Walking Keep Walking project – a free 12-week programme of short local walks led by volunteers.
Annette Crane, an outreach officer on the project, says that the results were striking: “One lady who could only walk a very short distance, walked nearly two-and-a-half miles by the end, had lost half a stone and her blood pressure was improved. She also said her mood had lifted as she was getting out of the house more, thanks to the confidence she gained from walking with a group.”
Inner-city communities, like these Asian women from Longsight in Manchester, are part of the ‘hard to reach’ groups targeted by Get Walking Keep Walking, which are blighted by mortality rates from heart disease, strokes and other related diseases that are as much as 50 per cent higher than elsewhere in England. By supporting and encouraging everyday walking as part of an active lifestyle, the pioneering, £5million Lotteryfunded initiative aims to combat this statistic and help people reach the government’s recommended minimum exercise of 30 minutes per day, five days a week. Now, at the end of its successful first year, pilot projects in London and Birmingham have been extended to Sheffield and Manchester.
While initially looking to tackle obesity and improve participants’ fitness, the project has found itself embracing a much broader cross-section of people facing a far greater variety of issues – from mental health and learning difficulties to social exclusion. It’s this challenge that attracted Annette Crane, who gave up a career in nursing to work for the Ramblers in Manchester. “One of our 11 groups brought together mums and toddlers from newly arrived immigrant families, many of whom were too scared to venture out on to the streets,” she says. “Volunteers from Get Walking gave them the confidence to go out as a group to both exercise and socialise.”
One reason for the early success of Get Walking is that the programme has been adapted to suit different audiences and some fruitful partnerships have been struck up. The Longsight group in Manchester, for example, was a collaboration with the Black Health Agency, which is trying to
promote awareness of the blood disorder thalassaemia in the south Asian community. So, one of the group walks visited a nearby clinic to meet the staff and learn about the disorder. In Hackney, east London, a partnership with the mental-health charity MIND has seen volunteers plot attractive routes through parks and along canal towpaths. And another mental-health
partnership with Birmingham-based BITA Pathways helped an agoraphobic man gain the confidence to leave his flat for the first time in 11 years.
The participants aren’t the only success stories. The number of volunteers who have been inspired to get involved has been immense. The volunteers help inspire and motivate participants, plus they put together the walks for each Get Walking group.
“The routes are devised by walk developers and checkers – a quarter of whom aren’t even
Ramblers members,” says Chris Wingrove, the project’s information and promotion officer. “More encouraging still, of those who are members, many have never volunteered before and seem to be attracted by plotting short and manageable urban routes. It’s proving hugely rewarding for all involved.”
The long-term goal is to give people the ability and confidence to walk on their own, so special DIY packs have been produced to enable people to start walking independently, which will also be given away to the wider public as part of the Ramblers’ spin-off Get Walking Day on 30 May.
For the Ramblers, Get Walking Keep Walking is the charity’s first major piece of ‘service delivery’ as part of a wider consortium of walking and cycling agencies called Travel Actively, which received £20million from the Big Lottery Fund’s Well-being programme. The shared learning
is proving useful and leading to closer relationships between the Ramblers and bodies such as Natural England, Walk England and Living Streets. At the same time, an urban project delivering short walks is helping rebut the assumption that the Ramblers is exclusively rural and only concerned with longer walks.
“We are appreciating the positive response and have recruited staff with strong community involvement skills, which has reaped great dividends,” says Chris Leigh, Get Walking Keep Walking’s project manager.
Already there are plans to build links with other health promotion schemes, such as physical-activity programmes developed with GPs and the government’s new Change4Life campaign to tackle childhood obesity.
“The project sends out a simple message to disadvantaged groups that walking is integral to
a healthy and active lifestyle,” says Chris. For more about Get Walking Keep Walking, visit www.getwalking.org.uk
- This entry was posted on: Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
- Filed under: Campaigns/Issues, Features, Walk Summer 2009
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