BOOST

Duration: 01/11/2024 - 01/11/2026

Aim of the project

Nelson Mandela once said that Sport has the Power to Change the World. This is a bold statement that most European sports stakeholders strongly believe in, and to which more and more contribute through both explicit and implicit Sport for Social Impact (SSI) initiatives. But although most professionals working in European grassroots sports organisations are aware of the potential to contribute to a positive social impact, many entry-level professionals still lack specific knowledge to exploit the full potential of SSI by designing impactful grassroots sports programmes that intentionally include personal development aspects. And at the same time, those professionals who are well capable of designing such impactful SSI programmes, often lack expertise in setting up and growing appropriate organisational architectures, which is needed to provide a sustainable SSI offer to European sports participants.

The BOOST project aims to empower SSI professionals to collaborate and accelerate strategies to improve their organisational architecture to make it more sustainable and improve their SSI programme offering so that it can have a greater impact. Through interconnected learning, mentoring, and design-thinking approaches, the accelerator connects entry-level to mid-level professionals across SSI impact fields with experienced SSI mentors and experts. It leads to co-creating and directly implementing innovative and applicable solutions in practice. Ultimately, this leads to a SSI sector that is strengthened in its role as a community of interest to develop more sustainable and impactful programmes for their participants; with positive outcomes on individual and social domains, such as health, education, inclusion, environmental sustainability, employability, or social cohesion.

Activities

• Co-creating a twelve-month accelerator concept and process that includes a mentoring approach. 
• Co-creating a learning hub with applicable thematic learning materials, plus mentoring resources. 
• Implementing a mentee and mentor identification process, and matchmaking procedure. 
• Identifying common and individual learning goals, plus implementing mentor trainings. 
• Piloting our accelerator and mentoring programme with SSI professionals across Europe. This leads to new or improved SSI programmes and organisational structures in the organisations of the participating professionals. 
• Validating and reviewing the quality and applicability of all accelerator elements. 
• Developing a sustainability roadmap to reach out to more professionals and to create a strong community of interest dedicated to Sport for Social Impact.

Expected Results

• An increased offering of quality SSI programmes that are guided by clear educational concepts. 
• More well-governed and healthy organisations being active in the field.
• Increased knowledge and skills of SSI professionals across Europe and beyond. 
• Improved exchange of good practice and a transfer of innovation between SSI professionals.
• Increased standards of organisational architecture and good governance in the SSI sector.
• Examples of quality benchmarks for SSI organisations and their activities.
• Reduced the risk of unintended and harmful outcomes of SSI activities.
• Improved credibility of SSI implementing organisations towards public and private funders.
• Maximise European grassroots sport organisations’ contributions to the UN SDGs.
• Strengthened SSI sector in its role as a community of interest to create positive outcomes in individual and social domains, such as health, education, social inclusion, employability, conflict resolution, environmental development, or social cohesion.

Ultimately, this project shall lead to a SSI sector that is strengthened in its role as a community of interest as a whole, to help foster health and well-being, education, equality and social inclusion, social cohesion, environmental sustainability, plus employability and employment, or other non-sport-related societal and European policy objectives.

Partners

• SPIN SPORT INNOVATION GMBH & CO KG (Germany) 
• SPORT AND SUSTAINABILITY INTERNATIONAL (SANDSI) (Switzerland) 
• OPES Organizzazione per L'Educazione allo Sport (Italy)
• RHEINFLANKE GGMBH (Germany)
• MUNDUS BULGARIA Bulgaria 
• ERICEIRA SURF CLUBE (Portugal)