The Leeds Summit on Community Sport for Development and Diplomacy saw more than 70 participants, practitioners and policy-makers, athletes and academics convene at the University of Leeds over two days in September 2025 to debate the power and potential of community sport as a developmental and diplomatic tool for both local and global impact. ConnectSport CIC was media partner for the event and, in this series of short articles, our reporter Josh Chadwick-Birch spoke to attendees about what they gained from the Summit.

Josh: Hi Asma, please can you tell us about your role?

Asma: I am the Head of Participation and Communities at the Muslim Sports Foundation. We are a Sport England system partner as of last year, in order to tackle the inequalities and barriers related to British Muslim communities in sport, who are the most inactive communities across the country.

What are you hoping to gain from this Summit?

I thought it’s a Summit and that I would benefit, and that there’s going to be some kind of call for action from the learnings. I love the passion of the stories, the needs and impacts, and it’s been great to connect to even more people from within the system that are doing great work. It’s what’s going to happen from this that I’m hoping to see, if there’s going to be some kind of system change or something that’s going to shift the dial a little bit. 

What key development would you like to see happen in community sport over the next five years?

I definitely want to see a collective voice. Things like this Summit are great, but I want to see the impact of community sport and the communities being affected. How are they, and their voices, being brought into conversations? What is it that sport can bring, which nothing else can bring? Are we looking at the nuances? Are we looking at the barriers, and if so, how? And what lenses are we using when building the framework? I’m expecting a lot… I don’t think I’ll get everything I want, but it’s a step in the right direction! I am passionate about community sport because I’ve been in it for nearly three decades, and what I’m seeing is milestone changes, but they are not on a big scale. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that people don’t actually understand the definition of community, because it means something different to everybody. It’s great to get the different definitions, but coming together as one definition that can help support everyone might be a step in the right direction. There isn’t enough diversity yet, so therefore you haven’t got diversity of voice or diversity of thought, which is really important to have - especially when those people are within those inactive communities. When you’re looking at sport through the data, you’re looking at where the problems are… but who’s living there, and how are we addressing it?

Thanks for speaking to ConnectSport, Asma.

Find out more at muslimsportsfoundation.org.uk

This story supports these goals and missions: