DVO club development officer year 2 award
We are pleased to support Derwent Valley Orienteers (DVO) in funding a second year for their club development officer
Last year we made an initial grant to DVO for a club development officer - see original grant article. The post was taken up by Chris Millard, and you can read about their Derby Night MapRun Series and first year report. This further award will allow DVO to build on the momentum from the first year.
Their plan continues to be to build a sustainable model of recruitment, training and activities which they can roll out to other areas in Derbyshire beyond the initial focus on Derby itself. As with many other clubs contracting a CDO, they are finding it takes a couple of years to reach this position. The brief remains twofold:
- Recruit and train new members
- Provide training for existing members to help improve not only their orienteering but engagement with the club.
They are starting to see results, with
- steady increase in participation numbers at activities
- injecting younger members into the club, and stopping the gradual increase in average age of members
- increased enthusiasm in the existing membership to help plan and implement the strategy
- more members attending the EMOA event official training this year than in previous years
- an online course on how to plan a MapRun, acting as a step towards becoming a full event planner.
You can see an article about the "MapActive" initiative to teach confidence in map reading on the DVO website here.
The city of Derby continues as the core focus for the CDO efforts. It has the largest ethnically diverse population in Derbyshire, who are seen to be engaging in outdoor activities which they would not historically be associated with, and the CDO work ties in with the city’s programme to get people moving – Move More Derby. Meanwhile Derby's many small and medium-sized parks and open areas provide good training areas.
Once this CDO activities are bedded down after the first year, they plan to widen the catchment area to other population centres in Derbyshire such as Ashbourne, Buxton, Matlock and Chesterfield. We wish DVO and Chris every success with the continuation of the project.
You can read more about all our club development officer funding here.