In April 2020, Sport England launched the Tackling Inequalities Fund (TIF) to make £20m of National Lottery funding available to support community groups in maintaining connections and physical activity opportunities in the recovery from Covid-19. The TIF also intended to support those disproportionately affected by Covid-19 and prevent the inequalities gap from widening due to falling activity levels. As part of a larger evaluation, ROC Research Consultancy conducted a short evaluation of TIF in Lincolnshire to understand how partners are working together to tackle health inequalities. 

Active Lincolnshire have been working with existing partners, and many new partners to support their applications to Sport England’s TIF. With an over 80% application success rate, £248,000 was distributed to a wide variety of projects aimed at helping people be more physically active. Through the evaluation, we learnt that key to the success of TIF was the way that Active Lincolnshire work with partners, and how are partners work with them. Active Lincolnshire had a great understanding of the physical activity opportunities and barriers across Lincolnshire, and worked hard to develop really strong relationships with partners. Active Lincolnshire also highly valued partners’ deep understanding of the communities and networks they worked with. This knowledge enabled Active Lincolnshire to work collaboratively with partners to make high quality, but realistic applications to TIF with an emphasis sustainable physical activity opportunities. A by-product of the collaborative approach were connections with new partners across Lincolnshire who were interested in working in the same way to develop and lead new and innovative approachs to tackling health inequality through physical activity. 

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