PlayGreen Project

With the support of the Erasmus+ Sport programme of the European Union, organisations from six European countries (Ecoserveis (Spain), ENGSO (Sweden), VoetbalFlanderen (Belgium), Malta Football Association, Estonian Football Federation and the Football Association of Finland) have partnered up to raise awareness and build capacities about environmental sustainability in sport all across Europe. 

Throughout the duration of the project, a team of young volunteers from Belgium, Estonia, Finland and Malta, are encouraged to think of creative ways for sport tournaments to be more sustainable and to locally implement these ideas together with the support of the national football association in their country. Within these two years, the volunteers are mentored in form of online webinars, as well as training sessions during the transnational project meetings organised in Malta, Estonia and Finland. Through this approach, the volunteers are introduced to basic concepts of sustainable thinking, and develop skills such as creative thinking, collaborative skills and international competence. Participants finally present their concepts in form of a self-reflection of their individual learnings at the final multiplier conference and award ceremony in Brussels in front of an audience consisting of sports professionals coming from all over Europe.

To date, the Green Teams are analysing the current ecological impact of sports events within their country and developing their concepts for sustainable innovative sport events in collaboration with their respective mentoring federation. Our Green Team Volunteers in Malta with the support of the Football Association of Malta have already engaged in cleaning and regenerating local pitches and neglected urban areas that will be used for the PlayGreen tournaments later in the year. Further, Voetbal Vlaanderen (Belgium) supports its local Green Team volunteers to organise the Keizer Karel Cup, an existing grassroots soccer tournament with over 1000 attendees, and promote more sustainable ways to run the event and make it ‘greener’.

The final conference will be organised in December 2020 in Brussels, presenting three key outcomes (named Intellectual Outputs) of the project, namely a study on volunteering, a pan-European volunteering concept, as well as a mentoring toolkit about sustainable volunteering in sport. These tools will be made publicly available for every organisation interested in building the capacities of young people interested in both sports and sustainability.

Photo: Peter Busutil

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