The conference “Free Kick for Equality – Moving to the next step in combating racism and homophobia together in sports” was the closing event of the project “Football for Equality - Tackling racism and homophobia with a focus on Central- and Eastern Europe”, co-funded by the European Commission. Several initiatives and grassroots organisations met for the first time and some collaborations were already initiated.
“It was not just the output – we adopted an action plan that will be online next week and a working group was founded to keep in touch and to start implementing some of the ideas that we developed in Bratislava,” Nikola Staritz, one of the conference organisers from FairPlay-VIDC, Vienna, concludes. “Moreover, the atmosphere was amazing and it was so obvious that everyone was very curious to get to know each other and to build up something together”. In particular, initiatives from Central and Eastern European countries and from the Balkans participated at the conference and found space and time for an important exchange.
Another essential point was – which was also the main goal – to bring together LGBT-groups, minority organisations, community centers and initiatives tackling racism, homophobia, sexism and anti-ziganism not only, but mainly, in football. This is an important step and we are going to follow this cross-sectional approach towards discrimination and continue to find similarities in the fights against different kinds of discrimination.
For FairPlay-VIDC, L’udia Proti Rasizmu and all other Football for Equality-partners the conference was a great success and the organisers want to thank all participants, speakers and facilitators for their commitment and participation at the Free Kick for Equality-Conference. It was a pleasure to meet about 80 different initiatives and to share ideas for further joint activities, examples of best practice and information about all the represented initiatives.
As it was the closing event of the EU-funded project “Football for Equality – Tackling Racism and Homophobia with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe” the partner organisations are looking forward to continue their important work… perhaps in a follow-up project.
Until then the Football for equality-network will keep in touch and hopefully grow further.
Find photos of the conference here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.631023790244449.1073741825.154712267875606&type=3
What follows?
- The adopted Action Plan will be online by Monday, 13th May on this website
- The Conference Report will be published at the end of May – it will be avaliabe online in this website, if you want to order a printed version, please write an email to: fairplay[at]vidc.org
- The texts of the essay competition will be available on this website at the beginning of June
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