The main activities of Hope Sports refer to non-formal education through sports, with a special focus on football. Through sport activities, Organisation Earth aims to enhance the participants’ life skills and facilitate their access to the labour market through employability-oriented activities. Besides of participants’ social inclusion aspects, Hope Sports uses the power of sports to raise awareness for universal social issues such as climate crisis, connecting our sport initiative with the roots of Organization Earth.

The activities are implemented in two refugee camps, targeting children resided there and in Athens city centre at municipal fields for children resided in shelters in a weekly basis.

To achieve projects’ objectives Organization Earth has developed synergies with stakeholders such as local municipalities, UEFA Foundation for Children, Barca Foundation and UNICEF.

Organisation Earth’s projects are using mainly methodologies and protocols widely used in the Sport for Good sector. Existing methodologies such as Futbolnet and Football3 have been used to determine the structure of the sessions, parallel with the organisation’s insights in using sports for green education.

Organisation Earth’s projects are subject of an evaluation with regards to their impact as part of the M&E processes. The assessment refers to participants’ development of soft skills, participants’ perceptions about how each project has impacted them and on educators’ experiences during projects’ lifecycles.

The project for refugee children has been successfully carried on for the past 4 years with a feasible possibility for an even longer-term perspective. Throughout these years, Organization Earth has effectively used its resources, both human and financial, to secure organization’s and projects’ sustainability.

Given that the activities use sports to achieve their objectives, Organisation Earth is confident that their participants will have high interest in taking part in the future. Some issues that may arise:

• Participants from different ethnical backgrounds might need time to work well together
• Girls, even motivated, might not want to take part in mixed-gender activities
• Each participant should be addressed individually, opportunities and time should be given so that they can trust the educators
• Educators should have the appropriate education or experiences
• Ambitions of the participants (e.g. becoming professional athletes) might not coincide with the scope of the program, thus they might drop out

In general, during the project’s implementation Organisation Earth did not face any specific challenges, although a day-to-day monitoring and adjusting is much needed

The project participants have the opportunity to participate in physical activity as a non-formal educational activity with specific objectives, scope and expected impact. The participants have gained soft skills such as improved communication and confidence and have reported a better level of adaptation in the host community.

Organisation Earth’s initiative aims to approach each child individually, gives opportunities to whoever is interested in participating and uses the power of sports to address personal, social, and environmental issues.