FIRE+: the European Commission renews its trust in the FIRE project’s partners

Sport and Citizenship and our partners are very pleased to be able to continue until 2023 with work already started by the FIRE project, to provide ever more effective tools to stakeholders in football: 6 new partners, 8 programmed pilot operations and three new teaching modules in the MOOC FIRE !

Since January, the European FIRE+ project (Further Football Including Refugees) has been promoting the welcome and social inclusion of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants through football. Its objective is to support sporting organisations involved in this area, partly by encouraging new and complementary vocations within these bodies.

Funded by the EU’s Erasmus+ Sport programme and led by Sport and Citizenship, this initiative over two and a half years is a continuation of the FIRE project (Football Including REfugees), which aimed to promote football as a means to inclusion, sharing, socialisation and access to sport for asylum seekers, refugees and migrants at the local level.

Based on a strong consortium of varied partners, FIRE+ will seek a better definition of the needs and differing realities of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants. This will be done, partly, by enhancing the courses available on its MOOC, a new tool, and the main legacy of the FIRE project. This MOOC makes it possible to take all the steps necessary for setting up a project for using football for the inclusion of exiles. It will be updated and complemented by new modules for women and girls, and for unaccompanied minors, in order to provide users with a more global approach to using football for social inclusion.

This was the aspect covered by discussions at the first FIRE+ event, held on 30th September and 1st October in Rome (Italy). Over the course of these two days, the partners, the project consultative committee, and various external stakeholders considered to be competent in this area, took part in discussions. This diversity allows us to bring together expertise and knowledge in the sphere of using football as a tool for social inclusion for unaccompanied minors, and to improve the consortium’s understanding of the issue and, as a result, the content of the MOOC FIRE.