Diverse Identities in Sport

This project was designed to support a culture of inclusion and promotion of sport for all by A) critically examining the access, participation and visibility of people within sport who identify in diverse ways, particularly lesbian gay bisexual people, transgender people, intersex people, queer and non-binary and other gender non-conforming identities B) raising awareness of innovative and inclusive approaches to increasing participation and equal access in sport of those excluded as a result of their gender identity or sexual orientation. The implementation of the project was split into six phases. Phase 1 was set-up and preparation during Transnational Meeting 1 (TM1). The project delivery team built relationships and the infrastructure, implementation, methodology and communication channels of the project were decided upon. We saw the development of a webpage and social media channels. Phase 2 took place between TM1 and TM2 and involved the recruitment of Action Panel members with diverse identities. Action Panel members were selected by each partner in their country context - Germany, UK (Scotland), Hungary and Bulgaria. Central to successful recruitment was the representation from different sports as well as of diverse identities. TM2,3&4 were used to host Phase 3, Action Panel development and presentation. Activity Days brought people with diverse identities together with other stakeholders such as professionals who work in the field of sport or local activists to explore innovative approaches to social inclusion, contributing to good practice. Some TMs and their associated Activity Days were scheduled in order to coincide with existing events and activities in each of the partner organisations in order to highlight good practice, enhance engagement, dissemination activity, and cross-organisational learning. Activity Days included Pride Glasgow, a Seitenwechsel talk and March #unteilbar in Berlin, Sofia Pride Sports Football tournament, a Central European University Gender Studies talk and an Atlasz Sports Club seminar. Where relevant, the project also empowered Action Panel members to re-engage in their relationship with sport by promoting the uptake of voluntary activities in sport and by engaging them with a sports movement. Transnational Meetings also included an update and mutual support day, built in alongside the activity days in each country. These offered an opportunity for each partner to assess progress, update on Action Panel progress, and build relationships between the panels. Importantly, the Mutual Support days also served as an opportunity to gain advice where partners were unsure and offered a key monitoring activity for the coordinating organisation. Having recruited Action Panel members in Phase 2 and developed key pieces of learning in Phase 3, Phase 4 involved the collation of stories about relationships to sport, some shared their experiences of exclusion from sport, and others their journeys to inclusion. These stories were captured on film during TM2,3,4&5. As stories were collected, they were collated into a new resource by Civil Works. Evidence collected from Activity Days and Action Panel members provided principles of good practice. As and when evidence was collected, TM3-5 were used to integrate this good practice into planning towards project outputs; the dissemination conference, film & it’s associated educational resource. Although Phase 5, project dissemination, had already occurred during Activity Days and smaller dissemination events, our main dissemination event was a conference in Berlin during TM6, which included project participants, many Action Panel members and sports sector partners. The film and good practice principles were shared here. The final phase involved evaluation and reporting, evaluation was taken from project partners, action panel members and conference delegates to form an evaluation report alongside final funding reports.