FIRE+ project: Football Including Refugees

The prime objective of the project is to encourage new and complementary vocations within grassroots organisations to engage in the social inclusion of refugees/asylum-seekers/migrants. Our project is aimed at fostering cohesion and inclusion, at upholding human rights, and at using sport as driver of social change. In fact, establishing direct connections with people from different backgrounds is a great way to remove prejudice, stereotypes and generalizations, which are often the first step towards improving cohesion. Our aim is to empower, enable and support sport organisations to work with the target group.

FIRE+ will be following the steps of our FIRE project. The best heritage we can have from FIRE will be the experience of the MOOC, an useful tool to teach all the volunteering grassroots club.

The situation of refugees here in Europe is harder than ever. The restrictions taken to limit the spread of the pandemic have created a lack of social interactions that were at the core of the inclusion of refugees in Europe, living most of them in precarious situation.

In spite of the current trend, an increase of migration and refugees is foreseen in the future (due to the climate change for instance). Developing tools for integration, like the MOOC, and make sport an important link in the chain of social inclusion, is essential to strengthen a European identity.

Goals

The FIRE+ project has set out to complete the following 5 objectives:

To ensure quality in the coordination monitoring and evaluation of the project.
To assess the experience and insight of active grassroots football clubs on creating and implementing a welcome programme or initiative or refugees.
To foster local activations at grassroots level.
To develop, inspire and share good practices.
To raise awareness and multiply experiences around sport, physical activity and exercises as tools for social change.