Building Innovative Governance for Sport

Background B4S is a collaborative project of 9 partners working together to strengthen the governance of European sports organizations, considering the most robust & relevant governance standards coming from the corporate world. By upgrading the skills of sports clubs and federations, these will become more democratic, transparent and accountable, thus improving its image and reputation in front of the society, including companies and / or public authorities in charge of sponsoring sports organizations. Objectives The general objective is to strengthen good governance capacities of sport organizations fruit of their collaboration with public & private sponsors. The partnership agreed to: -Jointly develop an innovative collaborative scheme to effectively enforce governance principles in sport organizations, built from the excellence of public & private (corporate) standards.-Implement and evaluate this scheme to deliver a solid & tested methodology transferrable to the EU sporting community. Implementation B4S managed to successfully roll out all its planned activities: diagnosis of sports organizations' governance, identification and selection of most relevant standards coming from private & public, publication of best practices and setting up a training package to enhance the capacities of the clubs & federations. This package combined online training sessions with the Agents of Change, online exchanges of best practices between staff from sponsors and sports clubs / federations. Achievements The project resulted in:-The creation, implementation and evaluation of good governance scheme through 4 training sessions involving 62 organizations.-The creation and implementation of 34 Agents of change between sport organizations and sponsors.-A final B4S conference (40 attendees) inclusive of networking sessions (more than 100 participants).-A portfolio of B4S tools available on the project’s website for all and aimed at helping sport organizations to enforce governance principles.