"Women in Sport Roadshow" : exploring partnership approaches to creating sport opportunities for girls and emerging women

![CDATA[This research explores how stakeholder organisations (Local council, National and State sport organisations, community organisations, private sport providers and schools) come together as a network providing girls and adolescent women with opportunities to participate in sport and physical activity. Using Social Capital theory as a conceptual framework and focusing on linking social capital, the research seeks to understand how a series of sport events, i.e. a ‘Sport Roadshow’, draw on social bonds to improve sport and physical activity outcomes in a local government area, in Sydney Australia. Through hosting free sport and health-focused events (with a ‘have a go philosophy’) during and after school, the program in its third year of operation provides a safe, aspirational context for girls to try new sports and engage with positive female sporting role models. This goal is especially relevant to the targeted social and economically disadvantaged community, which has low levels of physical activity and involvement in structured sport, particularly among younger and adolescent girls. A Social Capital framework has been utilised as it focuses on the effects and consequences of human sociability and connectedness and their relations to the individual and social structure (Tzanaki 2013). Accordingly, social capital’s underlying premise is how the relationships between people have the capacity to facilitate action and outcomes through generations of goodwill, trust and reciprocity (Hoye & Nicolson 2009). Specifically, Woolcock (2000, p.17) conceptualise ‘linking social capital as the relationships people have with those in power’. Conceived of and manifesting as ‘norms of respect and networks of trusting relationships between people who are interacting across explicit, formal or institutionalised power or authority’ (Szreter and Woolcock 2004, p.655). An emerging body of scholarship continues to explore the intersections between sport, social capital and disadvantaged groups and communities. It is here that we further situated our investigation and in part draw on Bourdieu (1984) conceptualising how social capital is connected with social relationships either with an individual or a group. Significantly, these relationships grant access to resources and so it is the amount and quality of those resources which shape social capital outcomes. By investigating how at the meso level, organisations, involved in the “Women’s Sport Roadshow” partner to redress barriers and constraints to adolescent girls and emerging women’s sport participation (Cavallins, Bennie and George 2019). Conversely, through these identified network relationships the research in progress also illuminates how in complex ways opportunities and outcomes are locked for this cohort of girls and emerging women. Our research in progress extends current understandings of the characteristics of social capital developed through stakeholder partnerships including resources, access and group goods aimed at impacting communities (Darcy et al. 2014; Edwards et al. 2012) and redressing barriers and constraints to girls and emerging women’s sport participation.]]