Access at the doorstep: Supporting engagement with movement-based programmes

Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) programmes that create opportunities to move outdoors via a volunteer-led activity offer a novel context through which to understand issues of access, participation and (re)engagement in structured physical activity or movement-based programmes. Through ethnography, this paper offers an account of the moments leading up to walking or experiencing a bike ride together in two different VCSE programmes. We focus on what is involved within and beyond the volunteer-beneficiary encounter in these programmes, and the different configurations of care that made participation and continued re-engagement in movement successful. We find that these configurations of care shifted moments of access, bringing to the surface the transitions, technologies, temporalities, and touch required of the volunteer-beneficiary encounter. Our findings demonstrate the importance of research exploring the “edges” of structured, movement-based activities, by showing what these moments reveal about participation, engagement, access, and care. We conclude by proposing that an aesthetic mode of enquiry within qualitative research could help inform the design, delivery, and evaluation of movement-based programmes or interventions.