Deloitte

Deloitte Disability Sport

Deloitte Disability Sport is one of the largest programmes of its kind in the UK. Our goal is clear: we aim to lead the way in corporate support for disability sport, getting people participating, then performing, then on to the podium.

Deloitte has invested £1.7m to develop disability sport in the UK before 2012. The programme includes two initiatives – Deloitte Parasport and the support of the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme (TASS), run by the charity SportsAid. The programme is match-funded by the Government, bringing the total value to £3.4m.

Deloitte Parasport

The big obstacle to future success in Paralympic sport is the strength of grassroots involvement and the number of people playing sport at community level. Having identified with ParalympicsGB that there were no clear development pathways for disabled athletes in the UK, Deloitte Parasport was created.

The idea behind Parasport was to connect people with a disability to high-quality sporting opportunities. Parasport is now building a larger community of active participants in disability sport across all disciplines, an important pipeline to find the next generation of Paralympians and to get more disabled people active through sport.

Hear Deloitte explain why Parasport came about 

Heather Hancock – Is a member of the board of Deloitte, she is on Deloitte’s Olympic services and is a consulting partner in the stategy practice. She has been at Deloitte for just under 4 years. Before that her career was almost entirely in the public sector including setting up the department of National Heritage. She spent a couple of years at Deloitte in the mid 90’s when she did quite a lot of sports consulting. She wrote the sport proposal for the UK Institute of Sport and assisted the Football League with one of their many restructurings of football and after she left the firm she chaired the Football Leagues working party on the future of football for two years.

Interview Transcript

I’m Heather Hancock and I’m the sponsor of Deloitte for the disability sport programme.

We were inspired to start to work with the British Paralympic Association at about the same time as our Board decided to significantly increase it’s investment in community activities in the UK. And in discussion with Phil Lane and Mike Brace at the BPA, it became really clear that one of the big obstacles to future success in Paralympic sport for team GB was going to be how strong the grassroots performance was and how many people were playing disability sport at grassroots level and we decided, well, that would be a great thing for us to work on together to plug that gap, and to try and find some ways that we could help people to see what they could play, how they could play it, where they could play it, and encourage more active disabled sport community to developing across the whole country.

We’re really excited about the Parasport project. First of all, just the sheer quality of what’s been assembled so far and, bearing in mind that this is a developmental project that over the next 4 - 5 years, we are expecting to grow and have lots of extras start to be added to it. But just at the heart of it, I think what motivates us most is the sense that anybody across the UK can now understand how they can become more active in sport, how they can form new relationships, how they can form new interests, how they can find potential within themselves that maybe they didn’t know was there and that they can develop. And for us at Deloitte we really pride ourselves on quality, on high achievement, on “raising the bar” and to be associated with disabled sports people who are also setting those standards and achieving them and overachieving them is a great thing for us to see happen.

It’s going to be interesting to look at what Parasports contribution to the whole disabled community might be. Obviously, we’ve started off with British Paralympic Association with a core idea and we hope there will be lots of interest and lots of support, and lots of hits on the website for people to find out about participating in sport. But really where it goes from there is going to depend a bit on the feedback we get from the people who are using it, finding it useful, using it and think there are things that can happen to it that might improve it’s usefulness to them personally, and also whether we build up a body of knowledge which helps us lobby Government, work with sports governing bodies about new things that need to be provided or some tweaks that could be made that mean that disabled people can better participate in sport and better succeed.

I think one of the really fantastic things has been the overwhelming enthusiasm of our staff. We employ over 10,000 people in the UK, we are the biggest graduate recruiter in the UK, we’ve got quite a young, very active population of people in the firm. A lot of them are very active in sport, and they have absolutely seized the excitement of what we are doing with disability sport, they are clamouring for ways to get involved. We hope in the future we will be able to see Deloitte people helping steward, marshal, provide mentoring support to people who are progressing in sport, and they are also going to be doing some fund raising to support the programme themselves. So, whilst at the heart of this is a core contribution from the firm of Deloitte. It’s also being backed up by individual contributions from our people. So they are going to put their time, their effort, their commitment as well as their money to what we are trying to achieve here.

I guess what we’re doing on disability sport has grown out of our corporate social responsibility programme. That’s something that matters massively to us as a firm. The real thing that we have to offer into the world is the sheer talent and skill, and commitment of the people we employ here - that’s absolutely the foundation of the success of this firm, their ability, their quality, their ability to make us an eminent player in business in the UK, and to be able to create something that our people say “we are proud to be associated with a firm that is doing something so valuable, making a difference, plugging a gap, helping people succeed”. That matters enormously to us, and corporate social responsibility for Deloitte its not just about ticking a box and a bit of a warm glow, its absolutely integral to the way we think about our business and the role we think we ought to be playing in wider society.

To get in touch with Deloitte please email ukdeloittedisabilitysport@deloitte.co.uk