Inclusivity Standards for the Fitness Industry with Laura McCafferty of Inclusive Wellness

The Good Gym Guide Podcast • Series 2, Episode 3

This interview is with Laura McCafferty, the founder of Inclusive Wellness, a social enterprise and community committed to increasing accessibility, diversity and inclusivity in the private health & wellness industry.

We spoke about the need for continuing personal development on these subjects and the potential role of standards in improving practice and giving marginalised people better access to health and wellness services. We also spoke about the potential pitfalls that any fixed approach might have, like one-off certifications or directories that aren't regularly updated.

Laura also lives in Bristol, so we met at the co-op gym for the interview. Every now and again there's a bit of traffic noise in the background but hopefully it's not too distracting.

In the first question I refer to the Active Inclusivity Standards. This was a working document that Laura put together when developing Inclusive Wellness - a web of potential good practice around accessibility and disability awareness, anti-racism and cross-cultural responsiveness, body and fat neutrality, being trauma-informed, trans-inclusive and LGBQ+ friendly, and economically accessible.

Although the Standards were a work in progress, I loved how specific they were. They felt like a really useful tool for breaking down that familiar feeling of overwhelm and futility and moving towards doing the best you can and committing to learning more.

I think the need for what Inclusive Wellness is doing is pretty clear.

For example, and on that topic of professional development, the best CPD courses I've ever done, Justice Williams' Deconstructing the Fitness Industrial Complex and Lucy Aphramor's Slow Knowing Deep Learning (both of whom, I'm extremely pleased to say, are featuring in this podcast series), brought amazing fitness professionals and other health and body workers together from all over the world.

As the courses concluded, there was a strong feeling of loss of community. The courses were these perfect bubbles of sharing and learning, and we experienced what parallel health and wellness culture might be possible.

We longed for connections with other sympathetic practitioners in our cities, and for a single place where everyone was listed. I started a spreadsheet I called The Good Gym Guide - hence the name of this podcast - and there are other examples too, like Superfit Hero's Body Positive Fitness Finder, which has now been taken down, or Decolonizing Fitness's Queer & Trans Affirming Database of Fitness and Movement Specialists, or LGBT Wellness Company, or Nonnormative Body Club's spreadsheet...

But each of these directories is looking through a particular lens - body positivity or queer inclusivity - and sometimes those intersections may not fit comfortably. For example, on my Good Gym Guide directory I have gyms that do unusual forms of strength training - arm wrestling or stonelifting or whatever - but I can't know that those places will also be trans-inclusive or disability aware.

So then we arrive at the idea of standards and certification, where we say that there are certain criteria a place has to meet in order to be included in the directory.

Or do we? Does every space have to be equally inclusive to all audiences? Part of what is so appealing to me about a co-operative gym model is that it allows for multiple and varied training spaces each serving their particular community. Personally speaking, that sort of diversity is more exciting to me than equally-accessible homogeneity, but perhaps it's also unrealistic in an economic environment where each gym would have to be self-sustaining, and it assumes an equality of opportunity and capacity to take on the running of a small business that some people, for example those living with a chronic health condition, may not have, so they may end up excluded again...

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podcastGuy LochheadSeries 2, Episode 3