Greece / Athens
Key-stakeholders involved:
- Ministry of Migration
- Barca Foundation
- Common Goal
- Fare Network
- Municipality of Athens
- Shelters for Unaccompanied Children
- sport for good NGOs
Brief description
Implementation of the practice
Impact
Lessons learnt/recommendation
Contact details
Organization Earth is a greek NGO, founded in 2010. Our mission is to deliver community-driven change towards a fair and resilient society, as anchored in the UN SGDs.
We offer “learning-by-doing” educational programs, aiming at adaptation to climate change, in urban centers, social inclusion, skill-building, and green education.
In 2015, due to the record refugee influx, OΕ expanded its activities aiming to combat discrimination and tackle inequalities in areas and populations that are hard to reach, such as refugees. OE, through its Hope Sports initiative, implements numerous sport programs involving children, women, and men that tackle societal issues such as gender inequality, learning disabilities, and long-term unemployment. We use sport as a vehicle for creating social change and not just providing physical activity. Our sessions aim to enhance positive social values, to be applied on and off the pitch, where every participant has the right to try, to fail, and to succeed.
Hope Sports is the Sport for Development & Social Empowerment initiative of Organization Earth, which initially began in refugee camps amid the humanitarian crisis of 2015 and the record influx in Europe of people fleeing war and destruction.
Nowadays, around 110.000 refugees and asylum seekers are residing in Greece, most of them coming from Afghanistan, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Iraq. In most cases, refugees living at camps experience idleness, a loss of morale and a feeling of desolation. The majority of them live in substandard conditions, are completely excluded from society, lacking residence permits and the means to meet basic needs. In essence, they are deprived of any opportunity to live in dignity and they are facing a number of barriers in their daily lives that undermine their integration into the host community. Refugees including children face homelessness, post-traumatic stress disorder, and lack of access to adequate living conditions, healthcare, and education.
Hope Sports, consisting of a team of 6 members, uses the power of sports to address a number of societal issues such as refugees’ integration, the inclusion of People with Intellectual Disabilities, and the promotion of a positive and healthy lifestyle for the participants. We also organize educational and recreational activities for our participants that provide opportunities for interaction with local and refugee populations enhancing their integration across local communities.
Impact 1: Provide access to organized sport-based activities.
Improving the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of participants.
Impact 2: Provide access to educational and personal skill development workshops.
We organize soft skills workshops covering a large range of activities in order to offer meaningful stimuli for the participants to explore their talents and interests.
The workshops promote the importance of the connection with nature to participants’ physical, emotional, and mental health. Also, our participants take part in recreational activities such as arts & crafts, dance, wellness, and psychomotor games.
Impact 3: Increase integration with the host population
During community-based activities, we ensure that we provide opportunities for mutual understanding and respect of diversity and highlight the importance of co-existence and fostering a sense of belonging.
When it comes to Sport for Development programs, engaging with the local communities, as well as being flexible and able to adjust to the actual needs of the beneficiaries, are crucial components in order to achieve best possible results regarding social inclusion and integration. Working with various social and ethnic groups, it is often that different cultures, religious beliefs and values come to interact, sometimes with tension in between, thus creating a great need for a bridge and ways for communication, understanding (diversity awareness and acceptance) and conflict resolution. In this way, beneficiaries come to better acknowledge the current conditions, thus creating empathy, safe space for expressing, as well a sense of belonging through having fun with sports and further developing their social skills.
Organization Earth
Kyriaki Retzeka, Head of Programmes
kr@organizationearth.org,
+30677272578
Organization Earth
Alex Kostaras, Program Manager
alex@organizationearth.org,
+306955704982
Organization Earth
Irini Lorentzatou, Field Coordinator & Sport for Development Educator irini@organizationearth.org
+306970030945