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Home Roles & venues Venue support toolkit Leading a safe and inclusive venue

Venue support toolkit

Venue support toolkit

Leading a safe and inclusive venue

Inclusive leadership video

Leading a safe and inclusive venue starts with leadership 

Creating a safe and inclusive environment is not the responsibility of one individual. It is shaped by the decisions committees make, the behaviours leaders demonstrate, and the culture they help create. 

Strong leadership helps ensure that everyone who plays, volunteers, works or visits your venue feels welcome, respected and able to belong. Whether you're a small volunteer-led club or a larger venue, building inclusion into leadership and decision-making can help strengthen governance, culture, support participation and improve the experience for everyone. 

Explore the resources below to help your committee understand its role, make inclusive decisions and create an environment where people can thrive. 

EDI Venue Policy Template  

Inclusion champion role descriptor template 

Committee inclusive meetings checklist 

A tennis or padel venue management committee should make decisions in the best interests of its members. Inclusive governance means building inclusion into the way the committee recruits, reviews information, makes decisions, sets priorities and manages risk.  

Use this checklist alongside your usual governance processes to ensure a more inclusive approach can be adopted, creating meetings where people are prepared and able to contribute and being clear on what happens next.  

Remember

You may benefit from appointing a named committee lead for inclusion with responsibility for coordinating updates and bringing relevant issues to the committee, as well as making EDI matters a standing item on the agenda for committee meetings.  

Inclusive decision-making framework  

Below are some example questions to help you open up discussion and bring inclusion to your everyday venue committee decisions.

Considering who might be affected by a change

Planning with inclusion in mind 
When discussing proposed changes to policies, fees, membership rules, court access, competitions, facilities or sessions.   When discussing and designing an event, programme or activity at your venue.  
  • Could this create or increase barriers for any of our current or potential members?  
  • Are there groups in our community who could be affected differently by this decision?  
  • What might we be overlooking because this feels normal or familiar to us?  
  • It seems to be the same people who keep coming to this [event/programme/ initiative]. Why do you think that might be?  
  • Could anything about the timing, cost, communication or format make it harder for some people to take part?   
  • What could help someone who is new to: the sport, your club or less confident about joining in?  

Checking for missing perspectives 

Challenging assumptions or biases 
When the committee does not have direct experience of the people affected or you keep hearing from the same members.   When comments or behaviours could reinforce stereotypes or exclude others.  
  • This meeting does not reflect all of the perspectives of our workforce and members. What can we do?  
  • Who have we not heard from yet?  
  • Could we ask members before making a final decision?  
  • Could our own experiences be shaping how we are looking at this?  
  • Whilst our intention may not be the case, we could be excluding people by doing this/thinking this. What do you think?  
  • I know that inclusion is really important to you/us, what was just said really goes against that.   
  • Let’s pause for a second and think about whether that was based on an assumption. What makes you think that?   
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