Expert Lecture Series 2022: The Highlights

In this special episode of Voices of The Walk we revisit the highlights from our Expert Lecture Series for 2022. The lectures were held over three days in February, with each session exploring one of the key themes of our new Step It Up strategy – that walking is for everyone, everywhere and every day.

We were joined by three engaging speakers, well-known for their expertise and fantastic work to empower communities to walk more for physical, mental and social well-being.

Bronwen Thornton, CEO of Walk21, tackled the everywhere theme, exploring how we can make our towns and cities more walkable. Bronwen delivered a summary of the work of Walk21, with global insight on walkability, measurement of walking and translating national strategies into delivery.

Bronwen was followed by Backbone CIC founder and Director Pammy Johal who focussed on inclusion, diversity and equality and how we can take steps to involve everyone in activity. Pammy spoke passionately about her personal experiences and of her groundbreaking work bringing wider access to the outdoors to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups.

Finally, our Expert Lectures closed with Lisa O'Keefe, Director of Insight at Sport England, who explored challenging social norms to build physical activity into everyday life. Lisa gave attendees an inspirational insight into the challenges and research behind the impactful This Girl Can campaign.

If you’d like to find out more about events hosted by Paths for All, be sure to visit the ‘What’s On’ section of our website or sign up to our e-news at www.pathsforall.org.uk/subscribe.

Watch Bronwen Thornton's lecture, or to view the presentation, click here.

To view Lisa O'Keefe's presentation, click here.

Transcript

Introduction (0:00):
Welcome to Voices of the Walk, Paths for All’s everyday walking podcast. Our mission is to get Scotland walking; everyone, everywhere and every day. In this podcast series, we’ll be hearing from a variety of Scotland’s walking champions who are helping make our vision a reality. In this special episode of Voices of the Walk, we revisit highlights from our Expert Lecture Series for 2022. Hosted online over three days in February, each of the three lectures reflected the key themes of our new Step it Up strategy; that walking is for everyone, everywhere and every day. Bronwen Thornton, CEO of Walk21 tackled the everywhere theme; exploring how we can make our towns and cities more walkable. Bronwen delivered a brilliant summary of the work of Walk21 with global insight on walkability, measurement of walking and translating national strategies into delivery.

Bronwen Thornton (00:56):
Globally, walking is the majority mode of transport. 70% of all trips, in fact over 70% of all trips, each year are walked. Now that’s not even a small majority, that is a substantial majority of all trips. Now that doesn’t mean that 70% of our transport budgets or our health budgets, or any of our other city budgets are spent on walking, but it does remind us firstly, that the vast majority of people in the world are walking, and secondly, that all of us are walkers. So, that 7.5 billion people is my group, this is why I advocate for all those people. So, the numbers get forgotten but the importance doesn’t. But the key thing that I want to pick up on and I was asked to speak to you today is our role in bringing walking to the international stage and giving walking a voice on all these different platforms, forums, agencies and activities that are happening. And so, we work very much on putting walking on the agenda. Now when I started in this job, and it’s been a while now, I can full confess that! But, walking wasn’t anywhere 20 years ago, except in conversations and conferences around Walk21 and also, of course, everywhere every day in the activities that we were doing, but it wasn’t as visible as it is now. And now we see the climate agenda, the road safety agenda, the urban agenda and the sustainability agendas are all addressing walking and incorporating and valuing walking in those processes. 

So, what we did was that we took all of the existing datasets to see what they say about walking. These are the headlines; the first one is activity. The World Health Organisation collects data on how much we’re moving, I think the Paths for All document is well informed by the Global Action Plan for physical activity, and what’s really interesting when you want to understand walking activity is mode sharing is not a useful measure. Most countries measure walking mode share by the commuting trip which is not all the people and walking is often combined, still, with cycling in that. And they don’t do trip stages where people walk to and from public transport; so, it’s very poorly counted. But when you count walking, the activity of walking by minutes, and disaggregate by age, gender, ability and income, you can really start to understand the walking in your community. I’ve mentioned already the core policy context for this is the World Health Organisation’s More Active People for a Healthier World. And they have a four-dimensional approach, and they do data collection around activity levels for walking. 

The second key indicator for walking that we believe is really critical is road safety. And the road safety agenda is again, and the data sets that we use around this topic are again, led by the World Health Organisation. SDG3.6 is all about reducing fatalities on our roads. And we all know that we always talk about, in the road safety world they talk about, the vulnerable road users, that people walking/cycling on two-wheel motorbikes are vulnerable road users. I will always say, and you’ve possibly heard me say this before, that these are our valuable road users. These are the people we need to value and prioritise in our public space. Because a safe system approach means that if we make it safe for people walking and cycling, we’ve actually made it safer for people in cars as well. 

The third criteria, the third dataset that we’re working with is for Sustainable Development Goal 11.2, which is about the percentage of people within 500 metres of public transport. Now you’ll appreciate that when you’re developing development goals for the entire world; for the variety of communities and countries and politics and people they’re trying to meet. Noting something down, even to say 500 metres of public transport is a huge success, but the gaps are obvious. What’s the quality of the access to that public transport? How do they get that cover, that 500 metres? What’s the quality of the public transport when they get there? It’s a very blunt measure but it’s a critical measure for walkability because 500 metres is a very comfortable walking distance. And we would argue that walkability, walkable cities, require people within 500 metres of key places where people are walking most. 

The quality question, which I just mentioned of course, comes down to the comfort on the street. Is there space to walk? Are there safe crossings? What’s the appropriate speed of vehicles in this space? And this is the IRAP data, International Road Assessment Programme, they have a star-rating system for measuring the road and making sure that the combination of things that have to come together can give each road a star rating to say whether it’s comfortable and safe for people to choose to walk and to enjoy walking. Because very often, many communities, people don’t have a choice to walk. Whether there’s footpaths there or not, whether there’s good maintenance or signage or crossing; people walk anyway; the vast majority of that 70% of people walking is people walking in unsafe conditions. Particularly in Africa, Latin America and Asia. 

And this is, as a global community, what we need to address and prioritise to give the value that walking offers these communities, because they’re already walking. So, when you bring those indicators together, we’re doing radar diagrams to show and compare all the different countries, so we’re profiling the national shape of walking for each of these countries. And we’re hoping that this profiling, this highlighting, gives them a starting point for their national strategies, their national approach. Looking at the road safety improvements, the comfort improvements, many places have policies, but they don’t have these other things addressed. And by bringing this data together, we’re able to give people a sense of where they fit and highlight and make visible the walking conversation. And all of this has been captured on our platform called Pathways to Walkable Cities. And here you’ll be able to find all this national data around how each nation is doing, capturing case studies at the different levels of action that people can take to improve the walking environment. And we also capture whether they’ve signed the International Charter for Walking, what their political commitment is, what their policy commitments are. And this way, we’re working continually to bringing the walking conversation to that global agenda. 

Host (07:34):
Bronwen was followed by Backbone founder and director, Pammy Johal, whose focus was on inclusion, diversity and equality, and how we can all take steps to involve everyone in activity. Pammy spoke passionately about her personal experiences and of her ground-breaking work bringing wider access to the outdoors to black, Asian and minority ethnic groups. 

Pammy Johal (07:56):
The top tip is, be sustainable. Work with others, closely, and be sustainable. In the walking industry there are traditional ways of doing. You look at clubs that are out there and ‘this is the way we do things!’ we need to break that. The future influencers are those folks that are walking today, that have only just got into walking in the last two or three years. Because they’re looking at walking in a completely different way. And this is the thing that I’ve been asking walking groups, and walking organisations, to do, is to tip your organisation and approach on the head. 

We’ve always been asked the question, “well what can we do about engaging BAME folks (black, Asian and minority ethnic) to our organisation?” And I’m going, well actually, here’s what’s happened. People are not coming to you, and those that have come to you, they’ve come to you through searching through the web, searching through this plethora of walking organisations. And some of them don’t even speak the language, some of them don’t have the kit and they’re really nervous about it and they’ve gone on this upward climb, found you, and are engaging with you. So, they’ve done the hard work. Organisations have been sitting around for 40 years, in my opinion, waiting for that to happen. And actually, as a sector organisation, as a service industry, it’s our responsibility to go to community groups. So, let’s turn that on the head and ask our organisations to go and do that hard work. You climb that mountain; you go make that uncomfortable knock on the door to community groups. To go out there and say, this is who we are, we want to engage with you. 

One of the key findings out of the symposium report last year in 2021, was the lack of confidence, knowledge and access to each other; from both community groups and sector organisations. But it is a sectors responsibility and work and job, as a service industry, to do the hard work and not the other way round. Social media is absolutely jam-packed with new organisations, you just need to see photographs, go, and say hello. Number one: go and say hello, bite the bullet and expect a response back. And if you don’t get a response back go, ‘hey! I want to meet up with you, tell me a bit more about you.’ You have to put yourself in that uncomfortable position and role. That’s a challenge that walking groups and walking organisations and any membership organisation in the great outdoors has today at present. It’s how do you challenge your membership to be more inclusive?

Host (10:35):
Our Expert Lecture Series concluded with Lisa O’Keefe, Director of Insight at Sport England, whose presentation explored challenging social norms to build physical activity into everyday life. Lisa gave delegates an inspirational insight into the challenges and research behind the impactful, This Girl Can campaign.

Lisa O'Keefe (10:54):
When we started to review all the existing literature on the subject, and then started to take away an awful lot of the practical barriers, so the ones that are the most easy for us to fix, in many of the projects that we’re involved in, we started to see a pattern emerging. We started to see that every barrier that remained could be tracked back to something truly universal. And it was fresh, and it was emotionally powerful, and we called that fear of judgement. So, what we could see in the literature was that women were worried about being judged on their appearance. So, during and after exercise. They also talked about concerns about being judged on ability. And that was equally true of whether they thought they were rubbish or whether they were ‘too good’. Because, often women who are viewed as ‘too good’ also face a bit of a backlash. And then finally on priorities, there’s a strong message that was coming out that women felt uncomfortable and felt that they were judged if they took out just 20 minutes in the day for their own physical wellbeing. That they should be prioritising all of their time, particularly for the family, for their children, for work. Everything tends to come first, before themselves and before physical activity. 

With all this in mind, we set out to do three things. We set to change how women and girls feel and think about exercise and playing sport; that was our number one objective. We also thought that this was a great opportunity to enhance the opportunities available to women and girls. And we hoped that through addressing those two elements, that we would increase those activity levels and we might be able to break out of that pattern that we’d seen when we just couldn’t close that gender gap. The final phase of the campaign is self-identification. 

So, behavioural economics suggest that making public statements improves the likelihood of cementing new attitudes and habits. And we wanted to create lots of different platforms and opportunities for women who resonated with the message of This Girl Can, to be part of the campaign. To share, to like, to tell their story. And that’s exactly what we did. You could take your own picture of you and your friends doing an activity, you could put the This Girl Can logo on it and you can send it round social media. And This Girl Can is very much about women talking to women; that is what the campaign is all about, we’re supporting each other through this. So, that methodology really enabled us to set the campaign free to the women that we were targeting, for them to use it, for them to be at the heart of it. And that really worked for us. And that self-identification came through time and time and time again in all of the research. The number of women who have spoken to me in focus groups or individual pieces of research where they’ve said, ‘I’m in the gym and I’m playing, either the advert in my head and I’m in it’, or ‘I’ve got the music on, I’m there, it’s very much me.’ And our target audience could see themselves in the campaign and all that we were producing. 

Small changes by providers can make a huge difference to how women feel. Examples of that, for me, so, I’ve done a lot of work with the swimming industry. And one of the things that we found is actually, if leisure centres quite simply put a film on their website, showing the route somebody walks to reception and then to the changing rooms, if you put that on the website and then you show what the changing room looks like. And you also show some of the people who are in and around the building, that helps women who are managing that fear of judgement. Because I can tell you, an awful lot of your target audience will be Googling everything they can about your activity, and trying to get a sense of whether that’s for people like them, who’s there? And also, there’s nothing worse, is there? You go into a leisure centre, first of all you can’t find the reception. Then when you do, you pay your money, you get to the other side of the barrier, and you’ve got no idea where you’re going. You stand out instantly as the newbie; nobody wants that, right? We want to be part of the crowd. So, just thinking about the little things that you can do with your activity that really helps somebody who’s researching it, to kinda get a feel for it makes a huge difference. 

Outro (16:00):
If you’d like to find out more about events hosted by Paths for All, be sure to visit the ‘What’s On’ section of our website, or sign up to our e-news at www.pathsforall.org.uk/subscribe