meeting 3: 1-3 April 2022 ROMA
Advocacy
Advocacy contest
we realized 3 advocacy campaing
we realized 1 official advocacy campaign
The third meeting in the presence of the PUNCH project, co-financed by Erasmus + Program of the European Union, was held on April 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 2022.
The members of the associations from Italy, Spain, Romania, Portugal and Bulgaria reached Rome to learn what it meant when we talked about Advocacy and how to run an advocacy campaign.
The meeting begins with a frontal lesson using slides that provide explanations and examples to become familiar with the tools for an advocacy campaign, such as videos, social media and or petitions.
Advocacy actions can give voice to the voiceless and help vulnerable people gain opportunities to increase visibility to express themselves through information, media, and communication channels.
We explained to participants about their role as youth workers and that, as such, they have a crucial concept to spread: sport is a tool for social inclusion!
Youth workers must not limit themselves only to being technicians. They have to understand that they influence their athletes positively or negatively: it depends on them!.
In the second part of the meeting, we split the participants into three mixed working groups with the task of brainstorming about the condition of three different young people at risk:
- Jennifer, 10 years old, disabled in a wheelchair, lives in a suburb of Rome,
- Amir, 14 years old refugee in Barcellona;
- Andrea, 17 years old transgender girl in Sofia.
To start the process of building an advocacy campaign, they focused on :
- the current situation of unease they live,
- what could be the ideal situation,
- finding potential partners,
- finding decision-makers.
After that, each working group has chosen to use videomaking to carry out their advocacy campaign.
Next step:
- define the message;
- identifying the audience to which the campaign was addressed;
- necessary tools to achieve the goal;
- the expected changes to be achieved thanks to their work;
- a hashtag that can summarise the message's meaning in a few words.
After editing the videos of their advocacy campaigns, each group presented their work to the others.
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The first group argued that including as many people as possible in sporting activities would make society fairer and more productive. They wanted to address the message to everyone, but particularly to sports federations and coaches, encouraging the sports world to create special programs such as those for disabled children. To make their message even more intelligent, they chose a clear hashtag that leaves no room for interpretation: sport can #ENABLETHEDISABLED.
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The second group started their campaign by arguing that the task of sport is also to help refugee people who come from difficult countries.
The message to get across to everyone is to integrate them into the society they arrive in.
Refugees are forced to leave their country of origin because of complex political and life situations. The task of all of us is to help them be integrated into the culture and society of the host country.
A great help in this process can be given by sports associations, using as tools, for example, the creation of free courses for refugees who cannot afford to pay.
This small gesture, which would not have a negative economic impact on sports associations, could help young people like Amir to get in touch with the new society in which they have arrived. Therefore, the message of this group is about sports clubs having the opportunity to improve the lives of refugees. Group number two has chosen as a hashtag a simple phrase that best encapsulates the spirit of inclusion that should characterise any sports association: #BEWITHAMIR
The third and last group opens the campaign with data about intolerance in Bulgaria, as 22% of spaces are not open to LGBT+ people. In this regard, they argue that sport has the power to unite people and overcome differences.
While all over the world, LGBT+ people are mistreated and discriminated against both on the internet and in real life, sports can fight social exclusion and teach respect for other people.
The advocacy campaign of this group also talks about the difficulties LGBT+ people have in being included in official competitions, and they expect this to change as soon as possible.
They argue that the first tools to be put in place to achieve this are accepting these people in everyday life and their inclusion in society without treating them as different just because of their life choices. To underline the importance of sport in fostering this conception of LGBT people, they chose a hashtag: #LETSSPORTTOGETHERTOMAKEABETTERWORLD.
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In this meeting, the participants learned how to write and promote an advocacy campaign.
The outcomes common to all groups see sport as a significant factor in encouraging young people's physical, mental, social, and moral development.
Sport is also an essential element in training; it represents one of the educational contexts in which children are trained: such as that of the family, school and peer groups. Sport offers opportunities for experiences of comparison between peers, knowledge of oneself and one's limits, and self-determination to win a prize and cultivate one's passions and discover new ones.
The main aim of these working groups was to make it clear that offering these opportunities to the most significant number of children is of fundamental importance, regardless of social class, culture, religion, sexual orientation or gender.
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