Collective Conversations: Finding the focus within the ambition - Liverpool 2027 Impact Hour

Some of the most useful Impact Hours begin not with a lack of ideas, but with too many ideas competing for attention.

That was the starting point when we spent an Impact Hour with colleagues from UK Sport and the team behind Liverpool 2027, a major international sporting event bringing four Paralympic sports to the city.

The ambition reaches far beyond the competition itself. Liverpool 2027 has the potential to contribute to wider change across disability, accessibility and inclusion, while connecting with arts and culture, community engagement, health and wellbeing, skills and employment. There are also many people and organisations with a role to play: sport, government, culture, local organisations and community groups, each bringing different priorities, expertise and opportunities.

The challenge the team brought to the Impact Hour was not how to generate more ideas. It was how to find the simplicity within that complexity: where could Liverpool 2027 make its most meaningful contribution, and what should sit at the heart of the wider legacy ambition?

Drawing on experience across strategy, inclusion, major events and community engagement, members of the Affleck & Co. Collective acted as critical friends. Our role was to listen for the patterns, challenge assumptions and help the group move between the programme detail and the bigger strategic picture. Rather than trying to cover every possible theme, we focused the conversation around three connected questions: what is the most important change Liverpool 2027 should help create; where can the event play a distinctive role; and what should guide decisions about partnerships, activity and investment from here?

Those questions helped the group test the different ambitions. What genuinely connects them? What already exists in the city? Where could the event act as a catalyst? And where would new activity risk duplicating good work already under way?

One of the strongest lines of thinking to emerge was accessibility.

Together, we explored how accessibility could be understood not simply as something that happens inside a venue, or as a compliance exercise, but as an end-to-end experience. That means thinking about how someone discovers the event, finds the information they need, plans and makes their journey, experiences the sport itself, and connects with opportunities afterwards.

This shifted the conversation from asking whether an event is accessible to asking what it would take for Liverpool 2027 to set a different standard for how disabled people discover, travel to, take part in and benefit from a major sporting event.

We also explored the importance of beginning with the expertise, relationships and energy that already exist within Liverpool's disability community. The opportunity is to work with and build on that knowledge, strengthening and connecting what is already there rather than creating short-term activity simply because an event is taking place.

The Impact Hour did not produce a finished strategy, and that was not its purpose. It gave the team a clearer organising question, a stronger lens through which to test ideas, and a sharper set of considerations to carry into the next stage of planning. That clarity matters. It can help a complex partnership decide where to focus, which opportunities to pursue, what to say no to and how to make choices that add up to a more meaningful legacy.

For us, that is where the value of an Impact Hour sits: creating enough space to step outside the detail, bring different perspectives to the challenge and find the thread that can hold the wider ambition together.

When the landscape is complex, clarity rarely comes from adding more. It comes from knowing what matters most and using it to make better decisions.

Written by Nicky Affleck & Vicky Lowe