Uniting the sport and mental health fields to support young people affected by displacement

A new repository of resources is now available! If you work in sport for protection or run programmes for people in displacement situations, chances are your programme includes elements of mental health or psychosocial support (MHPSS). You might have skills related to psychosocial support and not even know it. At the Olympic Refuge Foundation (ORF), one of our objectives is to increase the understanding, recognition, and promotion of safe sport as a tool to positively impact young people affected by displacement.

There is an abundance of innovative sports programmes to address factors for mental health such as trauma, self-efficacy and social inclusion. Programmes can use sports including football, basketball, skateboarding, volleyball, taekwondo, to name only a few as well as games and arts. Nevertheless, good practices in this field are not often recorded for others to use. As a result, many coaches or facilitators are not using sports activities deliberately to meet the mental health needs of their participants. Likewise, mental health professionals may not be aware of evidence or methods for using sport to improve mental health and social bonds. These knowledge and awareness gaps mean we risk missing an enormous opportunity to improve mental health and psychosocial support for millions of young people experiencing displacement due to war, persecution, disasters, climate or other challenges.

Quality approaches using sport and physical activity exist at every level of the Inter-agency Standing Committee MHPSS Intervention pyramid. Figure: Intervention pyramid for mental health and psychosocial support in emergencies (IASC, 2021, p.6).

Early in 2022, the ORF’s Think Tank mapped high quality tools and good practices in sport and MHPSS to make these more accessible to programme designers, coaches, counselors, monitoring and evaluation specialists and community members. The group categorized over 130 tools and good practice guidelines, and created a roadmap to make these widely accessible, especially for young people and those living and working in the Global South.

The group discovered a number of barriers to accessing these resources:

• most are in English
• many are in a long-form PDF
• most are not localized for specific contexts
• they may be buried in online archives and hard to find
• many use non-specific language such as peacebuilding, belonging, or wellness that some practitioners might not associate with mental health
• many are of an intimidating length filled with academic language

By sharing resources in a publicly accessible repository now hosted on the Sport for Refugees Coalition page, the hope is help address gaps in understanding for both sport and MHPSS fields and improve the quality of programmes all around.

Banner image credit: Game Connect – Youth Sport Uganda