Our activities

Our year-round activity

At London Marathon Events we are very proud of our history and our founding principles of celebrating unity and inspiring under-represented communities – particularly those from black and brown backgrounds – to participate in sport via our community engagement programme and The London Marathon Charitable Trust’s grant programmes. We are passionate about sport for all and the power of sport as a force for good. We are fully committed to making our events truly inclusive and working to make the sporting landscape more equitable.

When Chris Brasher and John Disley founded the London Marathon in 1981, one of their six founding aims was to raise money for sport and recreational facilities in London. Their vision was that the surplus from the London Marathon and all future events organised by London Marathon Events would go to our parent charity, The London Marathon Charitable Trust. The Trust provides funding in London and across the UK to enable people to become and remain physically active, and to challenge inequality of access to physical activity. 

You can see examples of recent grants from The Trust to support black and ethnically diverse communities in the boxes below:

Alliance of Sport in Criminal Justice received a grant of £1,000,000 towards the Levelling the Playing Field Project, which is working with the Youth Justice Board to use sport to engage and improve health and life outcomes for more than 11,200 children from ethnically diverse communities at risk of entering, or who are already disproportionately involved in, the Criminal Justice System in selected locations in England and Wales.
Sporting Equals received a grant of £327,000 to help 1,500 ethnically diverse children and young people across 10 faith groups in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Slough get more active and playing new sports.
Cycle Sisters, a charity aiming to inspire and enable Muslim women to cycle, received a £70,000 grant to challenge the inequality of access to physical activity for under-represented groups. A report by Transport for London found that women, ethnically diverse communities, older people and those not in employment continue to be under-represented among cyclists in London. This grant to Cycle Sisters will seek to challenge some of these inequalities by creating four new cycling groups for Muslim women in London boroughs.