Sport and refugees case study: ASPIRE

Briefly describe your project's goals and how it uses sport to address them.

ASPIRE – Activity, Sport, Play for the Inclusion of Refugees in Europe is an international project that focuses on social inclusion in relation to people who are at risk of exclusion, especially refugees. ASPIRE seeks to establish how sports clubs can best support the inclusion of migrants and refugees building on the wide popularity of sports and other forms of physical activity. ASPIRE could serve as a pioneer in the long-term perspective, offering a positive, evidence-based response with the help of sport to the many problems of inclusion, during and after the settlement of migrants and refugees, by utilising sport to facilitate the access of refugees to social services.

Describe any successes, challenges or results from the project.

ASPIRE gather partners with very diverse expertise including government bodies, national olympic committees, sport confederations as well as non-governmental organisations. Based on this diversity, the outcomes of the project are reaching a large audience of stakeholders. The content of the research and the training module are very helpful to promote the use of sport for helping the inclusion of refugees in a local and regional level. The main challenge is to help the organisations interested by the outcomes to implement new methods and include more minorities in their structures. Our training sessions in nine European countries are aiming to help local stakeholders to use our outcomes in their local realities.

What advice would you share with others wanting to use sport to work with refugees? 

Sport is a cost-effective and powerful tool to foster social inclusion for minorities used by many organisations. The impact of such projects using sport for inclusion is very well adapted to the needs of refugees that need to integrate European societies after long journeys. Sport methods that usually have to be adapted to traumas and specific need of refugees. Taking into consideration their needs is the most important concern in order to have effective projects with a positive impact giving real opportunities to refugees.