Orienteering
Mid Essex approach to orienteering opportunities
With many areas to utilise, and facilities available, Mid Essex wanted to work with Active Essex to increase participation in orienteering, ensuring it was easily accessible.
Orienteering provides a healthy, low cost, low impact opportunity for the local community, whereby they are encouraged to take part in increased physical activities and use of local facilities.
By increasing awareness of orienteering and subsidising costs for participants to engage in the activity, it was hopeful that the sport could be made more appealing to underrepresented groups. Since the beginning of 2024, the group have seen a significant involvement in female and trans gender representation, as well as a younger audience engaging in the sport.
Chelmsford City Council, notably local councillors, the staff at Hyland’s House and the Parks Department brokered a partnership that has been mutually beneficial in order to improve the course at Hyland’s Park. With significant support from Active Essex, these partners have able to support a successful project that has increased awareness of not only orienteering, but local community spaces too.
The orienteering network had relatively little experience using mobile phone based geo-location technologies, however the project has helped to broaden this experience and helped provide another low-cost method for participants to undertake orienteering using the MapRun application.
Key Learnings
It's important to take time to reflect and understand the learnings from work undertaken, to focus on ways to improve in the future.
Tackling Inequalities
Removing barriers to participating has been hard for ethnic diverse communities.
Obtaining feedback
Difficult when participants don’t regularly complete online or printed data forms.
Digital technology
Maps are free to downloaded so unsure how many have used Hyland’s facility.
