Grassroots Governance: The 7 Fs Framework

During this session we discussed governance in grassroots sports organisations, the challenges they face and how good governance practices are being embedded in clubs with limited resources and a reliance volunteers.

Date: 5 March 2025

Overview

Grassroots sports organisations are a bedrock of the country's sporting, social and cultural life. They are often our first point of contact with both the delivery and administration of sport. They are also subject to changing attitudes to governance and are uniquely vulnerable to a range of pressures: policy, societal, economic and environmental, to name a few.

In this webinar, we looked at some of the ways in which grassroots sport is responding to these challenges, the extent to which the improved governance practices that we are increasingly accustomed to seeing in larger bodies are manifested further down the sector’s ecosystem, and what this looks like in practice for clubs with little resource and which rely so heavily on volunteers to function.

The session looked in detail at the 7 Fs Framework, an aid for practitioners of club governance which summarises key governance aims, purposes and practices within a memorisable model.

The webinar accompanied the November edition in our Essays in Sports Governance series, Organisational governance & grassroots sports clubs, written by the two guests.

When asked what are the biggest challenges facing Voluntary Sports Clubs the wordcloud below contains the audience's answers: