Description
Sport is a social phenomenon that affects many spheres of society and often reflects its state. However, racism, homophobia and other forms of intolerance often appear in it. At the same time, some groups of citizens have problems with joining professional or amateur sport activities actively due to prejudices. The project aims at exploiting the positive aspects of sport to help inclusion of disadvantaged groups of society and to fight discrimination and hate expressions in sport. IPMD proposes several activities and events that would create a firm basis for the continuation of the project even after exhaustion of the funding. Our priority is the youth and with respect to future, education seems to be extremely important. However, our project does not include educational activities (workshops, seminars, publication) only, but also monitoring(web, annual reports), sport events (tournaments, FARE Action Weeks, multicultural team) and others like exhibition, theater performances, etc.
Summary of project results
Promoting tolerant society and combating hate expressions are issues currently more actual than a few years ago as people are protesting against refugees coming to Europe. We believe sport and education are ideal tools for fighting prejudices and stereotypes and supporting inclusion. We managed to implement all project activities. In certain aspects, we even managed to exceed the plan (eg. workshops at schools). We also did some extra activities (eg. Summer School against Extremism). In our activities we engaged groups targeted by hate speech: refugees, immigrants, LGBTIQ community and Roma. Young people were actively involved in our activities and assisted in their organization. The project continues after the end of the EEA funding. Recently, we have organized already the 8th year of the BLMF Tournament against Racism and Intolerance. We are still the leading organization in Slovakia for the FARE Action Weeks 2015. Our aim for the future is to do more activities in Romani settlements aimed at inclusion of Roma children through sport and education. We delivered many outputs: educational activities at schools (attended by over 1,000 youngsters), monitoring of intolerance in sport, sports events, cultural events, we actively commemorated the World Refugee Day. The main outcomes were: 1. admission of football governing bodies that there is a problem with hooliganism and discrimination in football and adoption of a new law on organizing public sport events by the Slovak parliament; 2. more initiative approach of schools and teachers in human rights education (with human library as a tool); 3. raised awareness and sensibility of children and youth on the issue of minorities and refugees; 4. pro-active approach of journalists in covering issues of discirminatory expressions in sports and inclusive sport activities/events. I would like to highlight also the smooth and professional cooperation with the Open Society Foundation Slovakia.
Summary of bilateral results