Thursday 16th June 2022

 

On the 13th and 14th of June, EASE held the kick-off meeting of the BeST Inclusion (« Better Sport Through Inclusion ») project. This project will last 3 years and aims at improving the employment of women, young people and people with disabilities in the sport sector.

The BeST Inclusion project aims to help achieve an inclusive workforce within the sport sector. It will consider the inclusiveness and the diversity of the European sport workforce around 3 axes: gender, age and disability. The objective of the BeST Inclusion project is to strengthen their employability by accompanying sport employers and giving them all the keys to hire these different categories of workers without fear. To do so, the consortium gathers 12 European partners, committed for the inclusiveness of the sport sector.

To meet these objectives, the project has been divided into 3 phases.

  • The first phase will be to analyse the barriers to employment for the three identified categories of workers, thanks to the organisation of 3 European roundtables. These online roundtables will be completed with some analytic data about the employment in the sport sector, in order to produce studies about the barriers to employment for young people, women and people with disabilities.
  • After the publication of these three studies, each partner of the project will organise a national roundtable to identify and analyse the best practices regarding inclusiveness and employment in their countries. This will help understand the reasons why and the means by which it could be disseminated, from the examples of countries where the workforce is the most inclusive. A guide of best practices for the inclusiveness and diversity of the sport workforce will be produced as a conclusion of these roundtables.
  • Finally, based on the work established in the previous phases, the sport employers will present recommendations for a more inclusive workforce, after a series of online meetings. Their participation will ensure that these recommendations are directly addressed to the stakeholders of the sport sector, to reduce the barriers to employment and encourage a more inclusive workforce.

This two-days meeting gathered the participants of the project, that had the chance to meet each other and discuss the organisation of the European roundtables.

The first day was dedicated to the presentation of the project and its stakes. BeST Inclusion was initiated as a follow-up of the ESSA-Sport project, led by EOSE between 2016 and 2019. This project was meant to analyse the labour market and improve the supply of skills to the sector. Part of the ESSA-Sport project conclusions were the necessity to work on the inclusiveness of the workforce of the sport sector in Europe, especially when it comes to gender equality. After the Covid-19 crisis, figures show that the employment of women and young people decreased (there is no statistical analysis regarding the employment of disabled people). More than any other, the category of young women particularly suffered from this crisis. As a result of this willingness to promote the inclusiveness of the sport sector, representatives of the Finnish Paralympic Committee also presented on this first day an inclusiveness charter, to ensure that the project meetings are accessible to all, thanks to a list of recommendations that will help organizers to be inclusive in any of their meetings.

The second day was mainly dedicated to the organisation of the European roundtables, that should help the writing of the studies regarding the barriers to employment for women, young people and people with disabilities.The European roundtables will be organised next Autumn by the Finnish Paralympic Committee, ENGSO Youth and the Alice Milliat Association, to highlight the barriers to employment regarding each topic of the project (age, gender and disability). Discussing with employers, workers and volunteers will help identify the causes of the employment issues and understand the barriers to employment for each target group, for a comprehensive analysis. The main goal will be to highlight meaningful facts, to understand the reality of the labour market and to identify the main barriers to employment.

This first meeting was a great occasion to gather the partner and to begin the work for greater inclusion by making recommendations regarding the employment of women, young and people with disabilities.

If you want to learn more about this project, you can find more information here.