Fit Villages

Fit Villages

What is Fit Villages?

Fit Villages is a well-established and popular project that makes a real difference to local communities by bringing people together to socialise, have fun and become more active.

We support villages in rural locations to set up physical activity sessions for adults aged over 55 by using local facilities such as community centres, village halls, libraries and playing fields. We've helped many villages across Suffolk to set up lots of fun and exciting activities such as Pilates, Yoga, Table Tennis, Nordic Walking, Zumba, Badminton, Keep Fit and Walking Football, as well as many more!

This project is supported by Suffolk County Council's Public Mental Health Programme, which aims to positively impact on inactivity levels across Suffolk, and in doing so, protect against poor mental health. The project is also being supported by West Suffolk Alliance and West Suffolk Council.

How does it work?

We work with Fit Villages Activators who volunteer to support us to engage with the community to discover what sort of physical activity session would be of interest, what day would be most suitable and what time would be preferable. This enables each project that we start to be successful and has resulted in 96% of our projects being sustainable and continuing to run long term.

A Fit Villages Activator is usually someone from the village with good local knowledge, a passion for supporting local people to be active and a great sense of community spirit. In addition to supporting Fit Villages Activators to administrate the consultation surveys, we also support by sourcing local and quality instructors, providing funding towards instructor costs, hall hire fees, equipment costs, marketing and promotion, launching the activities, providing refreshments and much more!

Our support allows local residents to access the physical activity at a subsidised rate for the first 8 weeks. After this stage we do not just step away, we will continue to support the village and instructor by continuing to promote the project and guide the activator where needed.

If you would like to register an interest in having a Fit Village in your area please click on the link below or if you have any questions regarding Fit Villages please contact fitvillages@activesuffolk.org

This project is supported by Suffolk County Council's Public Mental Health Programme, which aims to positively impact on inactivity levels across Suffolk, and in doing so, protect against poor mental health. The project is also being supported by West Suffolk Alliance and West Suffolk Council.