Green League is a project that aims to strengthen the link between sport and the environment through experiential learning, promoting outdoor physical activity as a tool for or to generate environmental awareness and encouraging sustainable practices in sport.
Green League answers the needs of encouraging the population to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts and of promoting healthy lives and well-being for everyone, therefore using sport as a tool to generate environmental awareness while contributing to a healthier lifestyle.
Objectives:
- Build the capacity of sports professionals at the EU level to promote outdoor physical activity as a tool to educate people on environmental matters by involving them in the collaborative development of the Green League Model.
- Design and deliver local sports events inspired by Nature’s Four elements, promoting sport’s practice while passing on a common environmental sense to young people, their families, and amateur athletes through experiential learning.
- Actively engage sports clubs, young players, and amateur athletes by setting up local Green Leagues combining sports tournaments and environmental action.
- Share the project’s key messages and values, while conducting tailored awareness-raising actions promoting the tangible role sport can play in enhancing environmental consciousness and upscaling the Green League model.
Description of the Practice:
Each of the activities implemented within the Green League project will be based on a different methodology.
- Participatory and collaborative approach: Through an international collaborative workshop, participants and partners will not only gain new knowledge about green sport initiatives and approaches, but also exchange experiences, expectations, values, and questions with a view to drafting the Green League Model to be replicated at EU level by other professionals and amateurs from the sport sector.
- Experiential learning in and through nature: during the Nature’s Four Elements sport events, sport professionals/amateurs, young people and their families, will reflect on how sport impacts on the environment and the possibility of shifting its influence towards increasingly sustainable means. During 8 local events, participants will reflect on their personal relationship with natural ecosystems, learn about their function, and reflect collectively on how they can reduce their environmental impact.
- Learning-by-playing approach: During the Green League’s Local Tournaments, sport clubs and young athletes participating in local sport and environmental competitions will have the opportunity to directly learn the importance of respecting the environment while challenging each other in team competitions, and in a relay race all this while taking environmental actions. While their attention will be focused on winning the competitions, the innovative scoring system, whereby points will be allocated based on environmental and sporting achievements, will ensure that they also learn that protecting the environment can be fun and inspiring.
- Sport communities’ endorsement: the methodology behind the design and implementation of the Green Champions campaign is based on the direct involvement of both the popular athletes and the local communities of players involved in Green League activities throughout the project. This will ensure that the values and messages behind the project are communicated withing the sporting community maximising its impact using videos and photo messages in the form of a ‘call to action’ via social media and the Green League website.
- Art and visual storytelling: Through Nature’s Four Elements sporting events, Green Zines will be developed as a means of both documenting sporting events and widely disseminating Green League’s messages. Participants of the sporting events will directly contribute to the content of the zines during the moments of group reflection and exchange of ideas, but also by collecting symbolic materials (feather, litter, etc.) found during their outdoor experience that can be reused in a creative way in the zines.
Impact and Results:
- 1 international collaborative workshop for sport professionals: collaborative development of a practical model, the Green League Model, to promote outdoor sports activity as a means of educating on environmental issues.
- 8 Nature’s 4 Elements Sport Events: sport events inspired by 4 natural elements to promote sport’s practice while passing on a common environmental sense.
- Green League’s Local Tournaments: mini-tournaments of team sports and relay races that combine sport with environmental actions.
- Green Champions Campaign: awareness raising campaign to promote the role of sport in enhancing environmental consciousness. ( video series & documentary).
- Green League Model.
Conclusion and Recommendations for Youth Workers:
Green League is a wonderful example of how sport can be used as a tool for environmental education. Its outputs underline activities done to enhance this concept which worked well in different communities and provides ideas for workshops and events connected to the topic.
The methodology is replicable, the workshops and best practices are usable in different contexts, the idea can be done in other countries.
We recommend to take a look at all the materials developed in the project as a base for inspiration and for action.
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