Building Bridges Statement
The Toolkit was designed to collect and share the know-how on voluntary projects involving people seeking or who have recently found refuge, as well as raising awareness on forced migration in general. The collection of guidelines, methods and case studies is non-exhaustive and should simply foster your own inspiration and support you in implementing projects on the topic. The creation of the Toolkit has been driven by the ever bigger need of the international SCI network to exchange best practices on projects in the field. It was coordinated by SCI Switzerland with the support of Útilapu Hungary. Its existence wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the Mercator Foundation Switzerland and the active contribution of the Building Bridges working group and a number of SCI branches.
METHODS AND TOOLS serve to support your work on the topic of refugees and migration with different target groups.
INTERCULTURAL FOOTBALL
Create a team spirit and bring people together!
Time needed: 1-3 hours + preparation
Objectives / aim: Reduce prejudices, reach people with a global education theme on human rights through sports
Level of Difficulty: medium; organizing a small school match is quite easy, but a public event requires effort and advertising
Resources needed: Volunteers, football and a field, referee and good relations to other NGO’s and locals.
Number of participants: Minimum of 20 to make the teams. Maximum depends on how much space you have for people coming to watch the match and side activities.
Contact / Source: Emmi Ruohonen emmi.ruohonen@kvtfinland.org
Organize a friendship football match for example between a reception center and a local school, sport club or another group. It might be a good idea to mix up the teams, so that they are not playing against each other, but with one another.
If you want, you can add a global education theme to the event and so combine some important global themes to football. However, make sure that the theme has a link with football, so that it doesn’t remain as a separate element in the match. Such themes can be for example radicalization of youth (hobbies such as football have a good impact in youth not joining extremist movements), fair trade or child labor.
You can bring up the theme through exhibitions, food, visitors etc. For support, contact organizations who work with the topic. You can also invite a guest referee who is either linked to the theme or known in the football world!
Steps:
1. Choose a place and groups that will play.
2. Choose a theme and make sure that you find materials about it
3. Fix up cooperative partners for the match.
4. Find a football field and a referee.
5. Set up a date and time.
6. Plan the side activities together with the other NGOs and volunteers.
7. Advertise.
8. Make it happen!
Tips:
- KVT Finland organized a fair trade football match together with a human rights theme camp in eastern Finland. We served fair trade food, had fair trade material and costumes, fair trade football and exhibition about fair trade football production. We also included a campaign called “red card against racism” and invited a “celebrity referee”.
- The preparation takes time, but the time depends on if you have already teams, venue and theme. Biggest question time wise depends on how much visibility and participants you want!
- Many NGOs are having football events and campaigns; there are a lot of different ideas and formats to implement.
- Prepare yourselves to changes in case of bad weather. We had a rainy day and it affected very much!
CONTRIBUTE!
You can share your experience, observations, tips and tricks, pictures etc. by uploading for instance a method or a case study to the Building Bridges Toolkit. As this Toolkit is a work in progress to which all involved parties are invited to contribute, we would also be very grateful for your support and contribution in order to inspire others to continue the work towards peace and intercultural understanding.
