The Include Summit. The “UK's number one equality, diversity and inclusion (ED&I) summit for sport

Hailed as the “UK's number one equality, diversity and inclusion (ED&I) summit for sport,” the Include summit bring together some of the UK’s top sporting voices and the ED&I leads from the country’s biggest sporting bodies for the first time.

What is the Include Summit?

Taking place on 8-9 March in Birmingham – the city of the 2022 Commonwealth Games, the Include Summit will be hosted over two days with in-person talks and workshops, which will also be streamed virtually for greater accessibility, will feature some of the biggest names in UK sport including, Denise Lewis OBE, Azeem Rafiq, Anton Ferdinand, Judy Murray, and many others. Chris Allen, the founder of Includability Official Partner, Your D&I will also be hosting a workshop at the summit.

Co-Founded by Gurmej Pawar, CEO of Meji Media Group, and Includability Ambassador Jamie Hooper, Founder of Inclusive Cultures, the Include Summit will bring together so many different voices from the sports industry for the first time. With a mission to get 1 million underrepresented young people taking part in sport, there will be a specific workshop programme for younger attendees. Young people and community leaders will also be able to benefit from free tickets to the event.

Who will be at the Include Summit?

The summit will also bring together ED&I leads from across the major football organisations together in one space for the first time. With representatives from The English Football Association (The FA), the Premier League, the Football League (EFL), the Players Football Association (PFL), and Kick It Out – the organisation tackling racism and discrimination in football – this will be first event they will have attended together, and the first panel discussion held between them.

Hooper expects there will be much attention on their discussion as football is widely considered as the nation’s game and it has the largest onus to drive cultural change. The engagement from the football sector to the event has given cause for excitement around the discussion.

What does the Include Summit aim to achieve?

The summit aims to encompass issues faced by all of UK sports industries with a strong focus on inclusion with large round-table discussions around race equality, women's parity in sport and tackling online abuse. With workshops on tackling toxic masculinity to effectively including Muslim people in sport.

Hooper hopes the topics can be discussed without limiting any issues raised to one specific sport. Often inter-sport collaboration on these topics is difficult due to way each sport is funded, but the summit could find fresh commonality between sporting industries that will spark more solution focussed discussions.

“The main idea behind this [summit] is to tackle the diversity of the workforce of the sport sector. We know that all of the issues we are going to be talking about across the two days in some way comes back to the fact that there is a lack of representation in the sector’s workforce,” said Hooper.  

With so many voices from a multitude of sports, it presents a challenge to Pawar and Hooper to balance the time to platform all the inspirational platform signed on to speak at the summit. Hooper expects the conversations may not go into the greatest detail but may serve as a jumping off point to future conversations and collaboration.

How has the Include Summit grown?

Speaking about how the concept of the summit has grown over the last year, Hooper expresses his excitement that the idea he and Pawar developed over email has almost reached realisation. He said:

“It's been a whole journey for me. I left the traditional sports sector just over a year ago. I launched my own consultancy in January last year and this opportunity has developed slowly. To see it grow from nothing from an idea on email to where we are now is really humbling. We are less than a month to go now, and we are really excited about where we can go with this in the future in terms of more events and conversations in between and particularly doing more with young people because the mission of the event is to get a million underrepresented and underprivileged young people into sport.”

Some of the key highlights of the event will include a fireside interview with Azeem Rafiq and Amna Rafiq speaking around their experiences with the UK cricket governing bodies, Judy Murray will be giving an opening talk around International Women's Day, and the second day will see Denise Lewis giving a welcome from her role as Commonwealth Games president of Team England.

The Include Summit is open now for tickets, and sponsor and partnership opportunities.