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Empowering Voices: LutaPod Amplifies Women's Stories in Sports
Royal Docks based international charity, Fight for Peace, is a youth-led organisation that combines boxing and martial arts with education and personal development to realise the potential of young people in communities affected by crime and violence. Their work is made possible through the continued support of partners including the Mayor of London and Sport England.
The organisation has been working hard to deliver vital services with an impressive list of achievements last year. Their young women’s group, Lutadoras, has been particularly active, spearheading the #FriendsCanTell initiative to help young women recognise and address toxic relationships. They also launched an exciting new podcast called LutaPod, which provides a platform to discuss the challenges women and girls face in sport, and explores solutions to some of these issues.
Each podcast features a special guest from the Fight for Peace Academy, one of the aims of the series being to positively influence how women and girls are viewed and received in sport. Their latest episode features Maelle, a young woman who has found a sanctuary of calm and motivation in combat sports, and who’s just show up attitude is an inspiration at the Fight for Peace Academy.
In conversation with hosts Asmaa and Athena, Maelle takes us on a journey of her connection with sport, spanning her introduction to exercise as a means of managing anxiety through to the role sport has played in her life more recently as she navigated university and professional life.
The podcast episode delves deep into some of the vital issues sportswomen deal with. Maelle gives her thoughts on training in predominantly male environments, the changes in body shape that come with sport, and the particular dietary and hormonal considerations that women and girls participating in sport face.
All LutaPod episodes close with an inspirational message from the guest, and for Maelle the key is showing up, even when you don’t feel like it. “Just show up, go to training, that is the hardest thing honestly”, she says. “Sometimes you don’t feel like it, a lot of the time I have a really bad day and I am really tired and I just show up and that’s what eventually encourages me because I know that I feel better and I feel calmer after and I feel happier after.”
The full episode of LutaPod featuring Maelle is out now on YouTube and Spotify, and you can catch clips of this and other episodes on the Fight for Peace Instagram channel @fightforpeace.
Fight for Peace offers a wide range of services and programmes to young people aged 7-25 across combat sports, education, employment, mentoring and youth leadership. For more information head to the Fight for Peace instagram page or website, or call 020 7474 0054.
