CHANGE project travels to Sweden together with its Expert Groups
In the last months, CHANGE project really focused on researching the challenges and investigating Change Readiness in Grassroot Sport, interacting and holding workshops with sport organisations, federations and clubs in 5 different countries (Sweden, Italy, Spain, Northern Ireland and Austria), in order to explore the main obstacles in pursuing innovation in the sport field at different levels.
All the consultations and activities resulted in the publication of the first phase of CHANGE research, where gaps between the actual role of sport and the role that society attributes to it were highlighted. In CHANGE project, partners aim to bridge these gaps by bringing sport organisations to be “change ready” and to be flexible and adaptable to todays’ constantly changing society.
"Our AIM is empowering the umbrella organisations in order for them to then be able to empower their members."
So to act on what highlighted from the research, the project aims to support sport organisations and federations through offering them a new interactive toolkit which will focus on change management, especially on the core topics of inclusion, digitalisation and sustainability. A pool of experts in this field will support the team in the making of the toolkit. Moreover we’ll use the expertise of innovative clubs, such as BASICS!, to collect good and best practices already in place around Europe.
To kickoff the work, experts and project team met in Malmö (Sweden), on february 29th. After discussing the expectations around the meeting, Karin Book (Malmö University, responsible for the research) went with them through the study to highlight the key points of the discussion to open a more practical phase in the workshop.
Supported by the WP3 team, participants then joined different roundtable discussions on how to interpret and bridge the gaps highlighted and how to address them in CHANGE final toolkit. What is a better format? What content is useful for sport federations and organisations to empower their members? How to have a real impact at grassroot level?
The work with the experts will continue in the next months, thanks to the coordination of N3xt Sports (Digitalisation), SandSI (Sustainability) and ENGSO (Inclusion/Participation).
On February 28th and March 1st, Malmö also welcomed the midterm partners’ meeting and the steering committee meeting, to evaluate the job done until now and to discuss next steps. In the agenda: work packages progresses, new timeline, how to proceed with the second phase of the research and the workshops, final conference in 2025, implementation plan (lead by OPES) to make the use and dissemination of the toolkit it’s organised in the most effective and efficient way.