The Balkans Project 2013

‘Football Beyond Borders: leveling the playing field’

This year, Football Beyond Borders will celebrate two first times. For the first time, we will hold a project in the Balkans and what is long overdue, a women’s football team is now part of FBB.

After the recent display of racism in the UEFA U-21 qualifier between Serbia and England, we have decided to make up our own mind about the situation in the Balkans in order to avoid prejudice on both sides.

Football Beyond Borders will take 20 students from colleges across the University of London on a three-week project, which will engage with numerous universities, social organisations, and community groups in Bosnia and Serbia.

The project will address issues including:

• The post-war situation in Sarajevo and Bosnia
• Gender inequalities within the society

We are looking forward to work with several partner organisations and institutions on the ground, doing grass roots work with:

1) Serbia - Milan Pasic: PhD student of Faculty of Sports and Physical Education in Belgrade. Member of scouting Serbia national futsal team and scouting team of faculty (work with FC Partizan Belgrade), and one of coordinator kids Fair-play league in soccer

2) Sarajevo - Bubamara BC, , www.bubamara.ba

3) Mostar - United World Collage Mostar, www.uwcmostar.ba,

4) www.osce.org, Organisation for Cooperation and Security in Europe

5) Sarajevo - orhideja.org/wordpress, The Orhideha Stolac Association

6) Serbia - Balkan Alpe Adrian Project (Anti-Racism in the Balkans)

7) Football in Prijedor– NW Bosnia.

--> Prijedor is a region of Bosnia and Herzegovina that saw some of the worst horrors of the war. One of the worst labour camps was on the region and today Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Roma are all separated. They live in very close proximity but have separate villages and schools. One of the largest issues with this is that firstly the education system is different depending on the school and the children never mix with children from other ethnic backgrounds.

Most Mira – an organisation that works around using music, art and drama to bring children from the 3 schools together. We will do the same but with football.

We do workshops in each school, coaching children from each ethnic background. The plan is to then organise on our last day a football tournament (5/7-a-side) with all the different children, where they mix into team’s irrespective of their ethnic background, and have a great day. After this we will have a match against one of the local teams.

A little excerpt of our Itinerary

30th of August:

Football workshops with multi-ethnic orphanage, Egipasko Sela Orhpanage, working with the organisation Our Kids Foundation (http://www.our-kids.co.uk/)

31st of Agust:

 

Tour of the town and of the Muslim (East) and Catholic (West) communities. Anti-racist and violence workshop in collaboration with Idriz Haris the President of the Youth Council with local youths. Discussion on the situation of Mostar focussing around education and ethnic segregation. + Football match against local team. 

1st of September:

 

Workshop with Association XY (www.xy.com.ba) an organisation who are dedicated to the improvement and promotion of healthy lifestyles through advocacy and the provision of high quality information, education and services provided to young people and marginalized populations, respecting diversity, choice, human rights and freedoms of all citizens in BiH. They also do a lot of work regarding a zero-tolerance violence policy toward women promoting female rights throughout the region.

2nd of September:

 

Travel by bus from Mostar to Prijedor in NW Bosnia. Welcomed into communities by host families. Here we will be working in collaboration with the organisation Most Mira (http://www.mostmiraproject.org/).

Prijidor is a region that saw some of the bloodiest fighting during the war and still retains strong ethnic rivalries. In the region there are three different ethnic groups, segregated into different towns. A Muslim town, A Serb-Orthodox town and a Roma community town. Each have a different education system and the children of these regions very rarely interact.

Over these days in Prijedor we will be holding different workshops in the respective schools and then organising a large multi-ethnic football tournament where children from these three schools can integrate and mix with children of another ethnic background. 

for the complete itinerary please contact us and we will be glad to send it over.

Where your money will go

As all Tour members are expected to fund their own flights, any money that is pledged to the project will go directly to the communities that we are working with, as apose to funding of individuals flights. The vast majority of the money that is pledged will therefore go towards paying for homestays and food cooked during these stays.

The reasons behind us utilising homestays are twofold. Firstly, for a short period of time, we become a part of the local community. This allows us to forge better working relationships in a quicker space of time than would otherwise be forged living on the ´outside´. Secondly, the money that will be used to pay for accomodation and food will go directly into the local area, something which has a far greater impact than if money was to be spent in international hotels and hostels.

 

What is 'Football Beyond Borders'

Football Beyond Borders is a Charity Organisation run entirely by volunteers that aims to use the 'beautiful game' to tackle political, social and cultural issues.

We believe that prejudice and discrimination are born from a lack of understanding and experience, and the best way to overcome this is through the use of shared cultural mediums. We believe football to be one of the most powerful cultrual mediums of them all, a truly global language which is spoken throughout the world.

Through our projects, we aim to engage with students and communities from across the globe, using football as a medium for cultural understanding, whilst also putting education back at the top of the agenda, and emphasising the plurality of the issues currently facing the global community.

What we do

Football Beyond Borders empowers young people to take a stand against powerlessness and engage in public life. As the divide between rich and poor continues to grow, we use the universal language of football to help level the playing field, overcome ignorance, intolerance and fear by encouraging young people to take a lead in bringing about meaningful change in their lives.

From the favelas of Brazil to council estates in London, we have delivered projects across four continents that harness the untapped power of young people to build networks, provide leadership opportunities and facilitate cross-cultural dialogue to provide the tools to break down these barriers.

We do this by creating educational projects that seek to promote understanding and acceptance and tackle a wide range of social issues from human rights abuses to a lack of access to good facilities. In doing so we equip tomorrow’s leaders with the skills to succeed in public life.

Since our formation, we have delivered numerous workshops and training sessions, hosted seminars with high-profile keynote speakers intended to highlight and address issues within society such as racism and gender inequality, and helped young people either gain access to jobs or provided them with experiences designed to increase their positive participation in public life.

In doing so, we have collaborated with important actors from the state, market and civil society. These range from government departments and international bodies to football clubs and activist groups.

 

Who We Are

Football Beyond Borders is made up of members united by a number of shared beliefs; that football, a sport that is enjoyed and appreciated globally, is a powerful medium in which to reach out to young people, and a resolution to tackle inequality, wherever it may be and in whatever form it manifests itself.

What began as a university football team in London has now grown to a strong core of 30 volunteers, with many more than this number involved in Football Beyond Borders and contributing to its continued success. With members hailing from over 15 countries, many faiths, and both male and female, we embody the very diversity and tolerance we aim to encourage through our work. Although our core membership used to be drawn primarily from university students, our work has seen us diversify this membership and now includes youths aged between 5 and 18 from across London, and a growing number of school-age leaders.

Many of our founding members have gained employment through the experience they gained from the association with Football Beyond Borders. From civil servants to youth workers the members have gone on to play prominent roles in society yet still realise the importance of having a long-term commitment to the organisation and our goals. The strength of our organization lies in the strong relationships that exist between our members and a shared desire to provide a level playing field for future generations.

 

Our History

Football Beyond Borders was established in 2009, following a conversation on a train home from a university football match in which team captain Jasper Kain challenged the players to travel together to Iran in the coming summer. With seemingly mutual hostilities continuing to be played out across the media the idea was for a grassroots student organisation to create cross-cultural dialogue that could highlight the notion of an “Axis of Evil” as being unrepresentative of the feelings of many Britons.

However, in the wake of the disputed Iranian elections, the team’s visa applications were rejected, and a decision was made that the same goals could be served by a tour of Turkey, Syria and Lebanon.

The month-long tour that followed had a profound impact on many of the players. The potential of football to act as a tool to engage with a diverse range of issues and communities, from Iraqi refugees in Syria and the Kurds in Turkey, had been realised. As a result of this initial success, annual international projects tackling specific issues pertinent to each region have taken place in Ghana (2010), Egypt, Palestine and Jordan (2011), Brazil (2012), and Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia (2013). These issues have been wide ranging, from human rights abuses to lack of educational opportunities and provisions.

What started with broad international aims would find greater domestic focus following the summer riots of 2011 that started in London, and spread across the UK. Many of our members grew up in communities that were affected by the riots, and there was a mutual feeling that the skills and experiences developed through Football Beyond Borders could be well used trying to tackle some of the underlying causes of the unrest.

This has resulted in an international university tournament hosted in London with over 100 participants coming from four continents and partaking in a rich program embedded in civil society as well as a growing partnership with a youth centre in Camberwell to establish a youth team and mentoring scheme.