Faith, Hoops and Charity - why weekly works
In this new, groundbreaking paper, we measured the health and wellbeing benefits of weekly religious attendance and physical activity alongside previous work on volunteering.
We found:
Attending church every week has the same wellbeing benefit as playing sport and physical activity.
If you are both physically active and attend church in the same week, you get double the benefit.
If you also volunteer - and volunteering is integral to the provision of both sport and church - you enjoy three times the wellbeing benefit.
Therefore the best investment to benefit your wellbeing is go to church, play sport, and volunteer once a week - Faith, Hoops and Charity.
If an individual did all three of these activities, every week, it would be the equivalent in wellbeing terms of an unemployed person finding a job or self-employed work.
A national preventative health service - available, free, now, and to all
We believe that through the lens of the Covid-19 pandemic we’re now experiencing an ‘Overton window’, a period when certain policies become more acceptable to the mainstream. We often hear that certain things can’t be counted or valued. But they can, and we’ve done it. Our work in Faith, Hoops and Charity offers government the hard data they need to support a system that is quietly yet effectively keeping Britain on an even keel and saving the NHS hundreds of millions each year.
Here’s how church, sport, and volunteering hit the bullseye of key UK policy agendas:
Social cohesion and trust in an unequal and divided Britain - church, playing sport, and volunteering help us mix with people from different backgrounds and ethnicities, engendering a sense of trust in one another - the OECD considers trust a cornerstone of a more efficient society.
Asset-based - another policy buzz word to describe the common sense approach of building around existing community assets in the shape of buildings, ready made networks like sports clubs, and churches. As UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden recently stated, 'Sports clubs are the beating hearts of their communities’.
Levelling Up - the benefits of sport and physical activity and volunteering are greater for those from low socio economic groups. We believe Sport England investment should only be targeted based on evidence of need. This evidence is now very clear and relatively easy to establish.