Ella Williams is the founder of Our Goal CIC. Our Goal is a not-for-profit organisation which exists to empower every girl to be active and to reach her full potential. Ella is a women in sport activist and her background is in football as a mentor, coach, and researcher.
Ella founded Our Goal because as a young child she loved sport, but when she reached her teenage years, she faced challenges which led her to drop out: challenges like feeling self-conscious, and that she didn’t belong. These are some of the reasons why currently, 43% of girls in England drop out of sport in their teenage years (Women in Sport, 2022). Finding her love for sport again later in life, Ella realised that too many teenage girls are missing out on the benefits of physical activity for their mental and physical health and wellbeing during their teens, and so she set up Our Goal.
Our Goal wants to achieve a world where every girl has positive, safe, and empowering experiences of physical activity. Ella will use the Shackleton Foundation grant to develop Our Goal’s school-based mentoring and physical activity programme, to be known as Eva. The Eva project is a 6-month intervention delivered to teenage girls to boost their mental and physical health and wellbeing through physical activity. It particularly targets inactive girls who live in areas of multiple deprivation as these are the young people who face most barriers to being active.