Wellbeing Strategy
Our strategy describes the principles we use to care for every person in aquatic sport.
This document reflects the approach we have shaped with athletes, coaches, officials, volunteers, team managers and whānau from across the aquatic community. The sport will keep changing, but these principles will guide every decision we make about the people inside it.
The Aquatics Collective's mission is to ensure that everyone who gives themselves to aquatic sport, in the water and around it, can take part safely, be heard when something is wrong, and leave the sport well. We will act on this directly through Be Heard and our own programmes, and we will consider the mission served wherever our work helps a club, a team or a single person reach the same outcome. To that end, we commit to the following principles:
People before performance
We commit to putting the welfare of people ahead of results, rankings and records. No medal justifies harm, and no role in the sport, from a first-time volunteer to a national coach, sits outside our duty of care.
Our first responsibility is to the people in the sport. We will pursue performance ambitiously, but never by trading away the safety, dignity or long-term health of the people who make it possible.
Early and safe to raise
We are committed to hearing concerns early, while they are still small, and to making it safe to speak. Be Heard exists so that no one has to work out where to go: one place to raise anything on your mind.
What concerns us most is silence. Anyone who raises something in good faith will be protected from retaliation, kept informed, and treated with care, and that protection holds whether the concern proves founded or not. We would always rather hear a worry early than a crisis late.
Capable, supported people
Care does not happen by goodwill alone. We will train and support the coaches, team managers, officials and wellbeing leads who carry it day to day, so that the right response is a skill the whole sport holds, not a matter of luck.
We will keep our practice current, drawing on evidence, on specialist partners, and on the lived experience of our own community, and we will keep what we build open to everyone rather than held inside institutions.
One aquatic community
We will actively cooperate across swimming, diving, water polo and artistic swimming, and with the schools, clubs, regions and national bodies around them, because wellbeing does not stop at the edge of any one discipline.
We are committed to sharing what works. What we learn, build and fix through Be Heard is offered to the wider sporting community, because every person deserves the same support no matter where they train.
A commitment to progress
This strategy is a living commitment, not a finished document. We will keep measuring ourselves against it, say plainly where we fall short, and change our systems as the sport, the evidence and the needs of our people change.
We commit to progressing our wellbeing systems together with the people who use them. Feedback from athletes, coaches, officials, volunteers, team managers and whānau, and what we learn through Be Heard, will shape every revision. When something is not working we will fix it, and we will keep this strategy current so the community can hold us to it.