Sport Bodies as Strategic Partners, Not Grant Recipients

In March 2026, Wei Shi published Treat Nonprofits as Strategic Partners, Not Just Philanthropic Recipients in the Harvard Business Review. The argument was aimed at corporations: stop treating nonprofits as line items in your CSR budget and start treating them as organisations that hold intelligence, relationships, and community trust you cannot build alone.

The article was written for the corporate world. But reading it, I kept thinking about sport.

Not professional sport. Not the broadcast-rights, billion-dollar-deal end of the spectrum. I mean the other 99% — the state sporting organisations running compliance programs for 200 affiliated clubs, the county partnerships trying to get inactive populations moving, the local club committees meeting in clubhouses on Tuesday nights to work out how to cover next season's insurance premium.

These organisations sit at the intersection of government policy, community health, corporate sponsorship, and volunteer labour. They are, in Wei Shi's language, boundary spanners. And they are almost universally treated as grant recipients.

I wanted to test whether Shi's framework held up when you replaced "nonprofit" with "sport body" and "corporation" with "government funder." So I asked people who would know.

The Roundtable

I convened a discussion with administrators and policy thinkers across Australian and UK sport. The question I put to them was simple: when a government body funds a state sporting organisation or a national governing body, is that a strategic partnership or a transaction?

The responses were uncomfortably honest.

"We Fill In Forms. That Is the Relationship."

The first thing that became clear is that for many sport bodies, the relationship with their funder is defined entirely by the grant cycle. Apply in March. Report in November. Demonstrate participation numbers went up. Repeat.

This is what Wei Shi calls transactional engagement — the equivalent of a corporation writing a cheque to a nonprofit and calling it a partnership. It is easy to administer and easy to measure. But it generates almost no strategic value for either side.

One state sporting organisation CEO in Australia put it plainly: "We know things about our communities that nobody else knows. We know which suburbs have youth disengagement problems. We know which schools have no after-hours activity options. We know which local councils are about to cut recreation funding because we heard it at a facilities meeting six months ago. None of that intelligence flows upstream. Nobody asks for it. The funding agreement asks for participation numbers and acquittal paperwork."

This is precisely the waste Shi identifies. Sport bodies hold early signals about community health, youth engagement, infrastructure gaps, and policy friction — the same kind of intelligence that nonprofits in healthcare and energy provide to their corporate partners. But the grant relationship is not designed to capture it.

In the UK, the picture is similar. Sport England’s Uniting the Movement strategy explicitly calls for a shift from funder to "system partner." The language is right. But at the operational level, the relationship between Sport England and many National Governing Bodies still runs on funding agreements with output metrics.

An administrator working with Active Partnerships — the 43 regional bodies that connect national strategy to local delivery across England — described the gap: "The strategy says collaboration. The funding agreement says compliance. When those two things contradict each other, compliance wins every time."

Three Kinds of Strategic Value Sport Bodies Create

Shi's framework identifies three ways nonprofits generate strategic value: reducing uncertainty, revealing market opportunities, and building organisational capabilities. Each of these maps directly onto sport.

Reducing Uncertainty

Government sport policy operates in a fog. Participation data is lagged by twelve to eighteen months. Community attitudes shift faster than surveys can capture. Local government decisions about facilities, planning, and recreation funding happen in council chambers that state and national bodies rarely monitor.

Sport bodies — particularly state sporting organisations and Active Partnerships — sit inside this fog. They hear things first. A netball association knows six months before anyone else that a key facility is being rezoned. A county cricket board knows which schools have dropped competitive sport from their curriculum. A surf lifesaving club knows that coastal erosion is about to make their primary beach unsafe for nippers.

This intelligence has direct policy value. When Sport Australia is designing its next participation strategy, or when Sport England is deciding where to direct Local Delivery Pilot investment, the organisations closest to communities hold the answers.

But in a transactional funding model, that intelligence is never asked for. The reporting template asks what happened. It does not ask what is about to happen.

Revealing Underserved Populations

Shi argues that nonprofits work directly with communities that institutions struggle to understand or reach. In sport, this is not theoretical — it is the entire operating model.

Community sport clubs are embedded in populations that government programs consistently fail to reach through top-down interventions. The football club in a low-socioeconomic suburb. The walking group run by a multicultural community centre. The disability sport program operating out of a school hall on Saturday mornings.

These are not niche audiences. In Australia, Sport Australia’s AusPlay data consistently shows that the populations with the lowest participation rates — women over 45, people with disability, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, people in lower socioeconomic areas — are often already connected to a local club or community group. The club knows who they are. The club knows what barriers they face. The club knows what would actually work.

In the UK, Sport England's own research for Uniting the Movement identified that people in the least active groups are the hardest to reach through traditional sport channels but the most likely to engage through trusted community organisations. The local club is that trusted organisation.

The strategic implication: sport bodies are not just delivery mechanisms for participation targets. They are intelligence assets for understanding how to reach populations that every other government program struggles with.

Building Capabilities

Shi's third category is the most relevant to sport and the least discussed. When organisations collaborate deeply over time, they build capabilities that neither could develop alone.

In Australian sport, this has happened where the relationship between a national body and its state organisations moves beyond compliance. Surfing Australia's work across coastal safety, mental health, Indigenous participation, and tourism is a case study in what happens when a sport body is treated as a multi-sector partner rather than a single-sport administrator. The capabilities they built — community engagement methods, cross-sector facilitation, culturally specific program design — now sit inside the organisation permanently.

In England, the English Cricket Board’s South Asian Action Plan used cricket clubs as bridges between immigrant communities, local councils, and health services. The clubs developed capabilities in community health engagement that had nothing to do with cricket and everything to do with the trust they held in those communities.

These capabilities do not appear in annual reports. They do not show up in participation statistics. But they represent exactly the kind of accumulated organisational learning that Shi argues makes deep partnerships more valuable than transactional ones.

What Changes When You Treat Sport Bodies as Partners

The roundtable kept returning to a practical question: what would actually be different?

Funding agreements would ask different questions. Instead of only "how many people participated," agreements would ask "what did you learn about your community this year that we should know?" Intelligence flows upstream instead of just accountability.

Multi-year funding would replace annual cycles. Strategic partnerships require continuity. You cannot build the kind of deep, trust-based relationships Shi describes on twelve-month funding agreements. Both Sport Australia and Sport England have moved toward longer funding cycles for some organisations, but the default for many sport bodies — particularly at state and regional level — remains annual or biennial.

Governance standards would be invested in, not just required. Currently, both Australian and UK systems require sport bodies to meet governance standards as a condition of funding. The organisations that struggle to meet those standards are often the ones that need the most support — but the transactional model treats governance as a gate, not a capability to be built. A strategic partnership model would invest in governance capability the way a corporation invests in a partner's operational capacity.

Sport bodies would have a seat at policy tables they are currently excluded from. Planning decisions, health policy, education curriculum, transport infrastructure — sport bodies have intelligence relevant to all of these. But they are rarely consulted because they are categorised as "sport" rather than as community infrastructure organisations that happen to deliver their mission through sport.

The Franchise Parallel

We have written before about local sport clubs as franchises of the community sport system. The parallel extends here. In a franchise model, the franchisor does not treat franchisees as grant recipients. They are strategic partners whose local knowledge, customer relationships, and operational feedback improve the whole system.

When McDonald's changes a menu item, they test it with franchisees first. When a government body changes a participation policy, they announce it to sport bodies after the decision is made. That is the difference between a partnership and a transaction.

Where Corporate Sponsors Fit

Shi's article is directed at corporations. In community sport, the corporate relationship has its own version of the same problem.

Most corporate sponsorship in community sport is transactional. Logo on the jersey. Name on the scoreboard. A cheque and a photo opportunity. This is the equivalent of Shi's "transactional giving" — it generates brand exposure but almost no strategic value for either party.

The more interesting model — and the one Shi advocates — looks like AIA's partnership with the AFL, where the sponsorship was structured around health outcomes, not brand placement. Or like the partnerships some UK Active Partnerships have built with local NHS trusts, where sport delivery is embedded in social prescribing pathways.

These partnerships work because they treat the sport body as what it is: an organisation with community relationships, trust, and delivery infrastructure that the corporate or government partner cannot replicate. That is not a recipient. That is a strategic asset.

We explored this dynamic in our piece on funding governance technology through grants and sponsorship, where we argued that framing volunteer time savings as community impact changes how corporate sponsors see the value proposition.

The Risk of Not Changing

Shi warns that "firms that treat nonprofits purely as philanthropic recipients miss opportunities to gather intelligence, build coalitions, and shape the institutional environments in which they operate." The sport equivalent is governments that treat sport bodies purely as program delivery agents missing the intelligence, community trust, and cross-sector capability that those organisations hold.

In Australia, the volunteer crisis in sport is accelerating. Clubs are losing committee members. State bodies are losing the experienced administrators who understood how the whole system connected. When those people leave, governance leaves with them. A transactional funding model treats this as a club-level problem. A strategic partnership model recognises it as a system-level intelligence loss.

In the UK, Sport England’s own Active Lives data shows sport volunteering is still 1.7 million below pre-pandemic levels. The organisations best positioned to understand why — and to design responses that actually work — are the ones closest to the communities where volunteers have disappeared. But their intelligence is trapped inside compliance reports that nobody reads strategically.

What Wei Shi Got Right

The most important line in Shi's article is not about strategy or intelligence or capability. It is this: nonprofits are "mission driven rather than profit driven, and because they are accountable to boards, donors, and communities, they are often viewed as more transparent and less self-interested."

Replace "nonprofits" with "sport bodies" and you have described every volunteer-run club committee, every state sporting organisation board, every county partnership in England. These organisations have trust that government agencies and corporate sponsors cannot manufacture. That trust is the strategic asset. Everything else follows from it.

The question for sport administrators — in Australia, in the UK, and everywhere community sport exists — is whether the systems that fund and govern sport are designed to use that trust strategically, or whether they are content to count it as a line item in an annual report.

Wei Shi wrote the blueprint. Sport just needs to read it.

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This article draws on Wei Shi’s Treat Nonprofits as Strategic Partners, Not Just Philanthropic Recipients, published in the Harvard Business Review on 26 March 2026. Roundtable contributions have been anonymised at participants’ request.