Across England, many sport and physical activity programmes can feel disconnected from the communities that they serve. For women and girls from ethnically diverse communities, finding supportive, safe and culturally appropriate spaces to get active and stay healthy can be challenging.
We spoke to social entrepreneur Shamime Jan to learn more about her leadership journey, and how she uses movement to support women from ethnically diverse backgrounds to feel empowered and establish strong social networks.
Shamime's story
Shamime’s commitment to positively impacting women from ethnically diverse backgrounds is founded in her lived experience as a South Asian woman.
Born in Pakistan and raised in England, Shamime grew up in a loving and happy family, although she often reflects on how sheltered this upbringing was from external societal pressures and inequalities.
“I was quite sheltered from the different experiences that Asian women face until I began volunteering at Mosques. This taught me a lot about the barriers marginalised communities and women experience.”
For the last three decades, Shamime’s been supporting culturally diverse women in the local community, starting out as a volunteer in Mosques across Manchester. This experience had a profound impact on Shamime, allowing her to hear directly from women from ethnically diverse communities who were struggling with their wellbeing and health, and giving her a better understanding of the barriers they faced in accessing sport and physical activity. Something she hadn’t consciously experienced up until that point.
Wanting to help more women like her, Shamime started as a driving instructor for an Asian women’s driving school and later became an Herbal Life coach, with a mission to empower women within the community to improve their health and start their own coaching journeys.
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Leader wellbeing
For Shamime, sustaining her community work has required her to be intentional with prioritising her own wellbeing. Shamime’s open about experiencing intense burnout, particularly from having the same conversations repeatedly without seeing tangible or long-term systematic change. To manage her overall wellbeing, Shamime draws on a small number of practices:
Faith
Her religion is fundamental to her overall happiness and wellbeing. Shamime says she manages her wellbeing by trusting that all the capacity and wisdom she needs will be provided to her.
Green spaces
Shamime enjoys spending time outdoors to reset, reflect and regain perspective in calming natural environments.
Breathwork
Shamime commits a lot of time to breathwork. She suggests that using breathwork helps regulates her wellbeing and remain focused. Paired with meditation and massages, Shamime finds solace in these solutions.
Respecting her time
Over Shamime’s leadership journey, she’s learnt to say no to certain events or opportunities where she envisages a lack of impact. She’s now very careful on the type of opportunities she says yes to and delegates tasks to others when possible.
“I want people to live happy lives. I’ve had to mask unhappiness and I don’t want that for others.”
Despite her positive work, Shamime’s navigated significant challenges in her personal life. For sixteen years, Shamime lived in an abusive marriage, causing her severe emotional trauma. She came out of her marriage with her mental health at an all-time low. A conversation with a doctor helped her name what she had been experiencing and begin making sense of the impact of that relationship.
To support her mental health and recovery, Shamime decided to begin going to the gym and attending Zumba classes. As she attended these classes, she often left feeling empty, finding that these mainstream physical activity spaces were often male heavy and didn't reflect her culture or the support network she needed at the time.
This period became a turning point in Shamime’s leadership journey. Shamime started running classes focussed on movement and culture and later set up Bollyfit Active CIC.
Through Bollyfit Active CIC, Shamime has developed a culturally responsive wellbeing model that combines movement, belonging, peer support and leadership development to improve engagement with under-served women who are often disconnected from traditional health and fitness spaces. In these spaces, women are able to connect with coaches who understand the clothing, language and social norms of these communities.
“I get so proud when women tell me that coming to Bollyfit for an hour will make them bounce for two days!”
Many women who first joined Bollyfit Active as participants have since progressed into volunteers, coaches and community leaders through Bollyfit Active’s training and development pathways, creating a growing peer-led ecosystem rooted in lived experience and representation.
At the heart of Shamime’s work is the belief that ‘belonging must come before behaviour change’. This philosophy has evolved into the BELONG Method - a community-centred approach focused on creating psychologically safe spaces where women feel seen, valued and empowered before lasting health and wellbeing change can happen.
Facing challenges
The challenges sector leaders face continue to evolve. Shamime’s leadership journey has come with a multitude of setbacks and obstacles. These include:
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Gathering support
Shamime entered the sector with vigour and motivation. She initially believed that demonstrating clear impact with ‘hard to reach’ communities would lead to support and funding early on. However, this wasn’t the reality and has taken many years for support to arrive. She feels as though funding can be distributed as a tick box exercise rather than being used to create systemic change.
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Funding barriers
Much of her early work was delivered on a voluntary basis, which limited her ability to scale her organisation, despite growing demand and impact. Even though there are clear benefits to her work, funding continues to be a struggle. Shamime is driving forward with succession planning, hoping to scale up a subscription model where women can train to deliver Bollyfit and be employed to develop a self-sustaining funding cycle.
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Institutional racism
Shamime has observed that community organisations led by women from ethnically diverse backgrounds can be invited into spaces to demonstrate representation, without being meaningfully supported or resourced. Often engagement with Shamime’s groups strike her as a tick box exercise, instead of long-term sustainable support or actually hearing the voices of those she supports.
“The system isn’t designed for us. It needs re-designing. We’ll create our own tables if our voice isn’t heard at theirs.”
Rather than disengaging and not continuing her good work, Shamime uses these challenges to strengthen her leadership and be a voice for ethnically diverse women in the community.
Top tips
Shamime’s extensive personal and professional experiences have allowed her to form some core top tips for other leaders, whatever they’re working through, to remain grounded in their work, strive for progress and advocate for themselves and their communities.
Prioritise health
Shamime reiterates that sustainable leadership requires personal care, boundaries and support. She emphasises the need to prioritise your health in order to make a lasting impact on the community you serve. Working with underserved communities can feel like a heavy load and mean you’re carrying a lot of others’ trauma – focus on personal growth, signposting to support and specialists and cleansing your energy when you can.
Enjoy the journey
Obstacles are inevitable in leadership. Shamime urges leaders to be patient, embrace challenges and enjoy the process along the way. Keep it joyous and notice the things to smile about every day.
“I’m proud of all these connections and smiles I’ve created in the community.”
Be ready to take opportunities
Shamime reflects on how important it is to seize every opportunity that comes your way, no matter how big or small. If you’re able to adapt, pivot and be open to new routes to success, you’ll inevitably go further.
In this segment, we asked the last leader we spoke to to leave a question for the next, they said: What’s a promise you want to make to yourself in this next phase of your leadership growth?
"1. To lead with clarity and courage, without over-explaining or over-carrying.
2. To protect my energy and health as a non-negotiable part of leadership.
3. To trust my lived experience and voice as enough."
What's next?
Looking ahead, Shamime’s focus is on scaling culturally responsive health and wellbeing models nationally, influencing systems change and creating workforce pathways for women from underserved communities through movement, belonging and leadership development. Shamime continues to seek new leadership roles that help drive change and create positive impact for the communities she serves.
“This needs to be bigger than Shamime. This needs to carry on without me.”
Alongside her ambition to drive change at a macro level, Shamime has begun introducing Afro fit classes at Bollyfit Active. These sessions are designed to celebrate African women within the community and give them a safe and supportive place to get active. She remains committed to empowering communities to take ownership of their health, wellbeing and future.
Do you have a leadership story you'd like to share? We'd love to hear from you, email us at leadingthemovement@sportengland.org and we'll be in touch!
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