Our work in Rossendale is centred around collaborative efforts to enhance physical activity, community well-being, and inclusivity in our place.
Through strategic partnerships, our work focuses on optimising existing spaces, engaging local communities, and addressing barriers to promote active living. By prioritising local insights and continuous collaboration, our workstreams aim to create sustainable solutions and cultivate an environment that supports more active lifestyles for all residents in Rossendale.
From building the hugely successful Rossendale Connected network, to empowering communities to lead local movements and working strategically with the council to embed change through policy and process — our work is about creating the conditions for long-term, sustainable impact. Explore some of our key initiatives below.
Visit the Rossendale Connected website here
Areas of our work include:
Rossendale Connected
Rossendale Connected began as a community response to the COVID pandemic and has since grown into a thriving cross-sector network rooted in collaboration, trust, and local leadership. What started as weekly online calls to connect services and share support has evolved into a powerful platform for action – bringing together residents, organisations, and decision-makers to tackle shared challenges and co-create local solutions.
Now more than just a network, Rossendale Connected is becoming a mindset, an ethos, and a movement — underpinned by shared values and a collective commitment to improving health, wellbeing and inclusion across the borough. The collaboration spans all sectors and is making a tangible difference in how partners work together to support the local community.
Each year, the network comes together in person for its popular Big Connect events — vibrant gatherings shaped by what matters most to the people of Rossendale. With themes such as Mental Health, Get Rossendale Active, Young People, and even a community-led Awards Ceremony, these events offer space to learn, share, build new relationships and generate ideas for collective action.
Shaping Strategies
Rossendale Physical Activity and Sport Strategy
Our work in Shaping Strategies has involved working closely with Rossendale Borough Council and a wide range of partners to co-create a locally rooted Physical Activity and Sport Strategy. This strategy is the result of collaboration, shaped by community voice, and focused on identifying the enablers and barriers to moving more across the borough.
The development of this strategy is a testament to the importance that Rossendale places on its residents being active. Complementing a suite of existing corporate documents, including the Council’s Corporate Plan, Health Plan, and Facilities Plan, ‘an Active Valley’ aims to underpin and contribute to the wider strategic priorities of Rossendale, enabling every resident to benefit from the opportunities being active creates.
The development process was kickstarted at the Rossendale Big Connect (2023), where over 30 organisations, including Sport England, came together to share insights, data, and lived experience. These sessions shaped the strategy’s focus on addressing barriers, motivating participation, and creating a supportive system for sustainable change. Additional insight was gathered through targeted engagement work, including a borough-wide ‘Women and Girls’ survey which revealed a strong desire to be more active – driven by mental health and wellbeing benefits.
The strategy centres around three interconnected settings:
Active Communities: To increase physical activity through a whole system approach, tackling inactivity using effective local Rossendale networks which engage and empower local people to increase their activity levels, ensuring priority groups and individuals are engaged and having a targeted approach to increasing physical activity and access to sports clubs.
Active Environments: Ensure active travel is built into the valley and that opportunities for people to be active is at the heart of the valley’s regeneration projects, influencing planning and property services, safe spaces, improving towns through regeneration and levelling Up.
Active Places: Maximise use of community assets (built and green and blue spaces), increase capital investment, and ensure sustainability of leisure facilities
By aligning policy with place-based action, this workstream is helping to create the conditions for more active lives—and a healthier, more connected Rossendale.
Sustainable Delivery
This area of work is about creating the conditions for physical activity to thrive long into the future. It’s not about delivering fixed programmes, it’s about supporting communities to lead, connecting systems, and embedding activity into everyday life in ways that are inclusive and lasting.
Guided by community insight, this approach has helped activate parks, schools, and green spaces across Rossendale. From the launch of a volunteer-led junior parkrun and donation-based Yoga in the Park, to free tennis racket schemes and family-friendly Couch to 5K routes – every initiative has been designed with sustainability in mind.
This work sits hand in hand with Rossendale Connected, using the network to build trust, strengthen relationships and create the connections that allow ideas to grow. It also directly supports Shaping Strategies by strengthening relationships within the council, influencing how services are designed, and ensuring people, venues and spaces are meaningfully joined up.
By connecting local partners, supporting new leaders, and removing barriers like cost, equipment and confidence, we’re helping more people take part and take ownership. It’s a whole-systems, place-based approach that makes movement possible through trust, connection and shared responsibility.
For more information visit the Rossendale Connected website or contact Jodie English, TaAF Rossendale – Strategic Lead: jodie.english@rltrust.co.uk