Sentries against discrimination back in action

The kick-off meeting of the European project "Sentry Sport" (led by Uisp) took place on Thursday 4 March 2021. The project intends to give further development (on a European scale) to the national Uisp Sportantenne project.

Racism is still today one of the most relevant issues in the European and world panorama. This is the reason why Uisp continues its commitment against racist and xenophobic discriminations also, expanding it to a European level through the Sentry Sport project, led by Uisp, and Co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European - Sport Collaborative Partnership, Call 2020.

The project involves, besides Italy, 5 other European countries: Denmark, Spain, Greece, Austria and France, committed to promoting the surfacing, prevention and mediation of the discriminatory phenomenon through sport. In fact, Sentry Sport is born from the experience of the national project Uisp SportAntenne, implemented between 2016 and 2018 in 13 Italian cities and represents its natural continuation and expansion, with the re-proposal at European level of a good practice tested on the national territory.

The kick-off meeting of the project took place on Thursday 4 March 2021, obviously online. On behalf of Uisp, at the meeting took part: the project coordinator, Daniela Conti, the head of international policies Uisp, Carlo Balestri, Marta Giammaria, Davide Valeri and Marco Proto, all members of the coordination group.

During the first year, is expected to plan and structure the capacity building programme, addressed to sport operators and managers from seven European cities. Afterwards, the project plan provides for the experimentation of the Sportantenne model in the selected territories of the partner countries. During this phase, actions for monitoring episodes of discrimination and mediation on the territory will start.

The kick off meeting was initially planned in attendance in Rome, but - due to Covid pandemic - it has been carried out via videoconference. In this occasion, has been scheduled a presentation session of the partner organizations and the roles they will play in the two years of the project.

In this regard, the International Culture and Sport Association - ISCA (Denmark) will be responsible for creating the internet platform in which the necessary training materials will be uploaded; VIDC (Austria) will deal with the training programme for coaches and sports managers; EFUS (France) will take care of drawing up the decalogue of recommendation on how to manage innovative anti-discrimination policies addressed to international and national institutions; Red Deporte y Cooperacion (Spain) will write a methodological guide for training; Koinsep endrasei (Greece) will manage the pilot actions to be carried out next year. UISP will be responsible for coordinating actions and structuring an international network on these issues, as well as writing the final project document.

During the meeting, future plans were analysed, also based on the difficulties linked to the pandemic risk: for the first year of activity, the replacement of face-to-face activities with remote ones presents no problems, being planning and starting training, which can also be carried out via videoconference.

For the second part, providing for the development of awareness raising of sports centre’s staff on the issue of discrimination, and for the training of this staff in order to be able to collect information and report on discriminations suffered by its members, and to give them support and advice, the best solutions will be found, also taking into account the progress of the pandemic. 

http://www.uisp.it/progetti/pagina/sport-sentries-are-back-against-discrimination