There are stubborn inequalities in children and young people's physical activity (PA) levels. Girls, and people from deprived areas and ethnic minority backgrounds are the least active. Inequalities in PA levels have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Bingham et al., 2021). The consequences of low levels of PA play out in child and adult health, wellbeing and academic outcomes. Tackling PA inequalities is at the heart of Sport England's latest strategy, Uniting the Movement (Sport England, 2021). PA leaders who young people relate to (due to similarities in, for example, age, gender, background, ethnicity) can engage the least active, as they show that PA can be for people like them, and make the young people feel comfortable. However, the UK PA workforce is largely white and male, which contributes to lower levels of PA in females from underserved groups (Sport England, 2018). The International Society for PA and Health (ISPAH) has recently published a call to action, which advocates for diversification and upskilling of the sport and PA workforce as a key component of a systems-based approach to increasing population levels of PA and reducing inequalities (ISPAH, 2020). Developing young female PA leaders contributes to positive youth development (PYD), which can build sustainable PA provision and improve the life circumstances of young females from underserved communities. Despite several young PA leadership programmes being delivered by different providers across the UK, none have been specifically designed to target underserved groups of girls, they focus on sport (rather than PA more broadly) and they are not evidence-based. This research will co-produce a framework, underpinned by PYD, for developing young female PA leaders from underserved groups (herein described as 'Leaders Like Us'). We use the terms 'female' and 'girls' for brevity purposes, but we aim to be inclusive of young people aged 16-25 who identify as female, non-binary or other minority genders. 'Leaders Like Us' can be used i) to adapt existing programmes to support uptake and delivery to underserved groups of girls, and ii) to develop new, locally-tailored programmes that benefit from enhanced quality and robustness but remain adaptable. The framework will include guidelines on how to identify, recruit and maintain engagement with young girls (aged 16 - 25) from underserved groups, outline learning outcomes for young female PA leader programmes, and provide recommendations for working with specific underserved groups. We will develop 'Leaders Like Us' through a two-phased approach, underpinned by the Double Diamond approach (Design Council, 2015). Phase 1 focuses on discovery; we will systematically map existing young PA leader training programmes, and conduct focus groups with stakeholders involved in developing and delivering programmes which target underserved groups, to understand what works, why and how. Phase 2 focuses on development. We will co-design 'Leaders Like Us' with a range of young females from underserved groups, practitioners and academic partners, through a series of workshops. We will then test its acceptability and feasibility through think-aloud interviews. 'Leaders Like Us' will help drive positive change in young leader development in practice, as it provides an evidence-based resource to support the development of local programmes that are relevant and meet the needs of females from underserved groups. This will help work towards a socially just and gender-balanced PA workforce, and ultimately promote lifelong participation in PA in girls and young women.

The communities and neighbourhoods where we grow up have a lifelong influence on the illnesses we get and how long we live. Health is about avoiding disease and having a long life, but is also about feeling well in mind and body, feeling safe, being part of a community and having things to look forward to. Many aspects of the world around us influence our health directly or influence health related behaviours. These so called "broader" determinants of health include the houses and flats we live in, the design of our roads and high streets, the availability and quality of parks, green spaces, libraries, galleries, museums, sports and recreational facilities, entertainment opportunities, places and events to connect with others, the shops and businesses around us, pollution levels, learning opportunities, the jobs available to us and whether we have enough money to make ends meet and to participate in social activities. Attempts to change health related behaviours such as unhealthy eating, drinking, smoking and lack of exercise, have met with important but limited success. For example, increased awareness of links between childhood obesity and ill health and the importance of exercise and healthy diet will have limited success if broader determinants are not also tackled. These broader determinants include, but are not limited to, the many fast food outlets that children may walk past, lack of access to high quality play and recreational facilities, sell off of school playing fields, streets that are not safe for children to walk or cycle to school, lack of high quality green spaces for exercise, shops with poor choice of healthy foods, increased screen time replacing physical activity, poor quality of school food, and, for some, insufficient income to buy healthy food. Our ActEarly approach focuses on improving the health of children in two contrasting areas with high levels of child poverty, Bradford in Yorkshire and Tower Hamlets in London. In preparation for this work we have worked with local communities, local authorities and other local organisations and have established shared priority areas for research: Healthy Places, Healthy Learning and Healthy Livelihoods. We have brought together experts in these themes with local community and local authority representatives to begin to develop a range of approaches to improving child health across these areas. For example, within our Healthy Places theme we will work together to: map local community assets and to understand how they can be improved and used by more people; develop a Healthy Streets approach and improve green space quality. In our Healthy Learning theme we will work together to develop local "Evidence Active Networks" of pre-school, school and community learning venues. These networks will help develop and evaluate a wide range of approaches to improve child health. In our Healthy Livelihoods theme we will work together on approaches such as relocation of welfare advice services to improve access, enabling parental leave, ensuring a minimum basic income in school leavers, providing life skills training and involving local communities in decisions on how to spend local authority budgets. To understand the effect of these approaches on child health we will develop strong data resources that bring together existing information from across our localities to measure changes in the local environment, health related behaviours and health outcomes. Teams of researchers will use this data and work with local communities to understand how successful our initiatives have been. We describe our emphasis on early life interventions, our highly collaborative approach and development of local data sources to enable evaluation of multiple initiatives, as the "ActEarly Collaboratory". We hope the approach will promote a fairer and healthier future for children and a global example of how to work with communities to improve health.

This project proposes a radical re-evaluation of the relationship between participation and cultural value. Bringing together evidence from in-depth historical analyses, the re-use of existing quantitative data and new qualitative research on the detail, dynamics and significance of 'everyday participation', it will create new understandings of community formation, connectivity and capacity through participation. Orthodox models of the creative economy and ensuing cultural policy are based on a narrow definition of cultural participation; one that captures formal engagement with traditional cultural institutions, such as museums and galleries, but overlooks other activities, for instance community festivals and hobbies. This frame, founded historically on deficit based assumptions of the logics for state cultural support, misses opportunities to understand the variety of forms of participation and their (positive and negative) consequences. We argue that by creating new understandings of the relationships between everyday participation, community and cultural value, we will reveal evidence of hidden assets and resources that can be mobilised to promote better identification and more equitable resourcing of cultural opportunities, generate well-being and contribute to the development of creative local economies. The central research questions are: - How, historically, did we arrive at the definitions, fields of knowledge and policy frames informing notions of cultural participation and value today? - What are the forms and practices of everyday participation - where do they take place? How are they valued? And how do these practices relate to formal participation? - How is participation shaped by space, place and locality? - How are communities made, unmade, divided and connected through participation? - How can broader understandings of value in and through participation be used to inform the development of vibrant communities and creative local economies? - How do we reconnect cultural policy and institutions with everyday participation? Using a variety of methodologies, including historical analysis, qualitative work with communities of practice and use, and the reanalysis of existing data on participation and time-use, this project focuses on six contrasting 'cultural ecosystems' to investigate the connections between multiple understandings of community (geographical, elective, identity based etc), cultural value, 'cultural economy' and everyday participation. The findings from the situated case studies will inform four partnership-operated trials of new policy interventions or of professional or community practices. Throughout the project research will be integrated with key partners, stakeholder cultural and community organisations in order to evolve better, shared understandings of everyday cultural participation and the implications of this for policy makers and cultural organisations at national, local and community levels.

To realise the transformational impact of digital technologies on aspects of community life, cultural experiences, future society, and the economy, the RCA proposes to host a DE Network+ focused on digital interventions that would create 'the conditions to make change' towards a sustainable post-industrial society - where the 'product' is the experience, where experiences promote human wellbeing and personal resilience, where the digital interventions are sustainable and promote societal resilience. To achieve a sustainable society, citizens require agency to control the impact they have on the natural environment. Therefore, an Ecological Citizens (EC) Network+ sustainable digital society would use digital technology to: Decouple the use of materials resources from economic development; add value to products through experiences and services; give citizens agency to take care of their environment (relating to waste reduction and reuse, energy generation); give citizens agency to design their own experiences involving products, which promote wellbeing, learning, self-advancement; enable experiences that empower citizens to do, to make, to repair, to learn, to create, to connect, to communicate, to interact, to understand, to share, to enjoy. This Network+ foresees the next move in technological interventions is in creating and implementing "the conditions to make change", i.e. the experiences and interactions, and digitally networked societal actors that enable sustainable transitions for societies and communities. To enact this vision, this proposal focuses on a model of 'distributed everything' - knowledge and know-how, design, materials flows, fabrication and hacking, energy generation - as the fundamental societal transformations that are needed to achieve sustainability require a re-examination of how knowledge is produced and used. Co-production of research is a key mechanism for improving the knowledge required for the fundamental societal transformations needed to achieve sustainability [1], and is central to the approach of the EC Network+. With leading partners, we will inform a truly sustainable 'digital society', built within communities, ensuring legacies through ambassadors, and setting agendas for future transdisciplinary research teams. The EC Network+ will provide a scaffolding to spawn new projects about sustainability at a range of scales (Village, Town, City). This collaborative trans-disciplinary approach is essential for tackling our unprecedented environmental challenges. The network will be built through activities including pump priming, collaborative residentials, learning webinars, strategic roundtables, media and communications, reports, podcasts, and a micro funding scheme. The academic consortium covers the core areas of computer science, sustainable engineering, human-centred design and citizen science. Led by the Royal College of Art (RCA), this proposal builds on Dr Phillips' My Naturewatch, a DIY wildlife camera project that engaged 3 million+ people with UK based wildlife, the circular economy work of the RCA's Materials Science Centre (Prof Baurley), the sustainable engineering and physical computing expertise of the Faculty of Arts, Science and Technology at Wrexham Glyndwr University (Prof Shepley), and expertise in citizen science and policy of the Stockholm Environment Institute at The University of York (Dr West).