Tom Monks

Background

About Tom Monks

My professional career started with two years in audit at Deloitte. These two years were critical to the journey that I am now on, as they taught me that I needed to pursue a career in an industry that I feel passionate about. Ten years delivering PE, school sport, physical activity and intervention programmes in a secondary school gave me incredible insight into how sport and physical activity delivered well can help children and young people to develop their self-worth, life skills and self-confidence and to broaden their horizons. In 2014, I was fortunate enough to be recommended to Up and Under Sports and Bristol Rugby Community Foundation who were looking to increase their tag rugby coaching across Greater Bristol. Two and a half years later Bristol Sport Foundation was founded as a charity and Forever Sport, the name of our PE and sports coaching programme, was broadened to deliver the three core sports of Bristol Sport - football, rugby and basketball. Fast forward another six and half years and I am immensely proud to lead an outstanding team of over 70 sports coaches, educators, mentors and sports development practitioners who are positively impacting the lives of children and young people across Greater Bristol and Bath and North East Somerset every week. Growing a delivery and management team, from the starting point in 2014 of myself and an one apprentice, and together engaging, motivating and inspiring children to fall in love with sport and physical activity has been the most rewarding (and challenging) nine years of my professional life. My philosophy is that I fundamentally believe that there is at least one sport for every child; the key is to provide children with a broad array of sporting opportunities that are fun, safe and inspiring and that they are delivered by brilliant people who also happen to be passionate and wonderfully skilled sports coaches and educators. I believe we have a responsibility to elevate the place and value of PE, school sport and physical activity, in order to help children and young people to balance the demands of the digital age. I am a values led individual and I genuinely want to make a positive difference to the children that we coach, the individuals that I lead and the organisations that I work with. I take pride in doing things properly, with an acute attention to detail and I value curiosity, integrity, empathy and self-awareness in others. I am open to conversations and opportunities that can help me and/or the people and organisations that I work with to learn and improve.