From passion to partnership: how The Active Pregnancy Foundation reached a game-changing milestone
Five years ago, The Active Pregnancy Foundation (The APF) was a new charity with a big ambition: to make it easier for women to stay active throughout their childbearing years.
Today, that ambition has the backing of Sport England, with more than £250,000 of National Lottery funding supporting a new strategic partnership designed to reduce inequalities and help more pregnant and postnatal women be physically active. For Sally Kettle, co-CEO of The APF, it is a significant milestone and one that feels particularly meaningful after five years of building the organisation from the ground up.
Pregnant and postnatal women remain one of the least active groups in the country and are often underserved by the sport and physical activity sector. Yet physical activity can play an important role in maternal and infant health, with evidence showing that being active during pregnancy can reduce the risk of complications including gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia and postnatal depression.
The new partnership will focus particularly on women living with disabilities, facing mental health challenges, or at risk of long-term health conditions. These are groups who can face some of the greatest barriers to being active.
For The APF, the partnership represents the culmination of years of work to establish pregnancy and postnatal physical activity as an important part of the wider conversation about women's health.
Since its launch in 2020, the charity has grown a national presence by educating and supporting the people who work with pregnant and postnatal women, raising industry standards, addressing knowledge gaps and bringing different sectors together to create the changes needed to make being active easier.
It is also a relationship that has been developing for some time. Sport England has previously supported The APF's This Mum Moves programme and worked with the Foundation and Moving Medicine on Active Mums Start with You, helping healthcare professionals have better conversations with expectant and new mums about physical activity. The APF has also endorsed Sport England's work with Couch to Fitness to create programmes tailored to women during and after pregnancy.
The new strategic partnership takes that relationship to another level. For Sally, the announcement brought an unexpected mixture of emotions.
“It felt like a relief,” she says. “We’d been working on passion alone for so long and to get the funding, and the credibility that comes with it, from Sport England was genuinely one of the best things that’s happened to me in my career.”
But, as Sally knows from experience, reaching the summit is often when you realise just how big the mountain actually is.
“Then the anxiety set in!” she admits. “Suddenly it was the 'hows, the whats and the whens'. But expeditions have taught me that when you’re faced with something enormous, you eat the elephant in small chunks. That’s how we’re approaching this too.”
That ability to break a seemingly enormous challenge into manageable steps is something Sally has relied on throughout her career - from ocean rowing expeditions to building The APF into a national organisation with the ambition and credibility to influence the wider system.
It's clear that reaching this point has never been a solo endeavour. The partnership is testament to the work of The APF’s wider team, particularly the close collaboration between Sally, fellow co-CEO Dr Marlize De Vivo and the charity’s board of trustees. Together, they have built an organisation capable of not just identifying the problems facing pregnant and postnatal women, but bringing people and sectors together to do something about them.
Sport England’s own announcement recognised that wider contribution, highlighting The APF’s role in raising industry standards, addressing knowledge gaps and bringing sectors together to make it easier for women to stay active throughout their childbearing years.
The funding provides The APF with resources to reach more women, but the partnership also brings something less tangible: the credibility and influence to push for the system-wide change that has always been at the heart of the charity’s ambition.
Sport England has described the partnership as an opportunity to make an impact not only on individual women’s lives, but on the wider system supporting maternal health and physical activity. It also sits firmly within its 10-year Uniting the Movement strategy, which aims to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to be active, regardless of their background or circumstances.
For an organisation that began during the first lockdown in 2020, reaching this point is a significant marker of how far The APF has come.
“None of this has happened because of one person,” Sally says. “The teamwork between me, Dr Marlize and our board of trustees has been fundamental to getting The APF to this point. Now we just have to deliver.”
Five years of passion, persistence and stubborn optimism have created the platform and now comes the opportunity and the responsibility to use it. The ambition remains the same: to help rewrite the story of women's health and make it easier for every woman to be active throughout her childbearing years, but now The APF has Sport England alongside it.
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