Sports for Social Impact started with this webpage in January 2020.
Before I started this project I had been involved in sport as a swimmer, coach, having completed a few internships as a sport administrator, and worked as an advocate for 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion in sport. I was lucky to have been selected as a Young Sport Maker for Global Sports Week Paris in February 2020 right before the first lockdowns started happening in March 2020. This event opened my eyes to what was going on in sport outside Canada. The conversations were so much more advanced and imaginative than what I heard in Canada.
I wanted to think about sport in new ways, and combine my formal education in public policy with my passion for sport. Out of this came Sports for Social Impact. I wanted to share these lessons with the world and bring back some of the conversations I heard in Paris to Canada and help shift the trajectory of the sport industry to one that is more purposeful and impactful.
A lot has changed since January 2020. Perhaps the biggest (and maybe obvious and doesn’t need to be said) change is that we went through a two year global pandemic that shook all of society and shone a light on inequalities that had not been seen before. Many of the first articles on this website envisioned a world after the pandemic that was built back better based on the power of sport.
I don’t think this has come to pass. From this little corner of the internet it has not appeared that the sport sector has made its case to the greater community as to why sport was vital for a strong recovery. Instead, health care systems have deteriorated further since the end of the pandemic, people continuously report increased feelings of social isolation and loneliness, students are falling behind in school, in 2021 it was revealed that COVID-19 could result in four lost decades for gender equality, carbon emissions have continued to rise (even in countries where they are falling it isn’t falling far enough) and the income gap has widened further between the wealthy and everyone( else. These are just to name a few. Sport has been missing from action on all fronts.
Even though as of lately we have been focusing on the podcast and haven’t been producing very many written articles, I’ve had two main objectives for this project. First and foremost has been to seek out and explore the many ways that sport has a social impact. The guiding question has been how sport can have a positive impact on people.
Through this project I also wanted to expand what we think of as sport. Not just the formal sport sector that governs competitive sport, but also our local, regional and national parks that offer spaces for frisbee golf, hiking, kayaking and more, and exploring topics like creating active environments through urban design and community gardens. A lot of sport happens day to day outside the confines of the traditional sport industry. I have sought to expand our ways of thinking.
I hope that I have accomplished this at least in part. I know there is still more work to do, and many more conversations still to have.
As we enter the sixth year of this project, (fifth year of the podcast) and as we near 100 episodes of the podcast I wanted to take some time to reflect on some of the biggest takeaways that I’ve had from nearly 100 conversations with sport practitioners, administrators, athletes, coaches, fans, policy makers, sport clubs, non-profits. Guests from within the sport sector (including the sport for development sector) and from outside the sport sector. While the backgrounds of the guests have varied and their roles in sport differ, there have consistently been the same take away from each episode no matter what the topic of the conversation was.
Selling Sport as a Force for Good
We have to do a better job at selling sport and its potential to do good in our communities. This podcast has aimed to be part of that story telling and helping raise the profile of sport for development and sport for good projects.
This is the most common thing I hear on the podcast. That most people do not know what sport for development is. When guests come on the podcast, I often ask about the challenges that they have faced when entering a new community to help uplift through sport, the most common answer is that they have to educate people on what sport for development is.
Sport is one of the most recognisable and visible sectors on the planet. Many cultures have their own sports, and everyone knows what sports are. What reaches more people through radio and televisions and social media than sport events? Billions tune in to watch the Olympics and World Cups. The issue is not that people don’t know what sports are. No, the issue that sport for development organisations run into is that communities don’t know how sport can be used for social objectives. They know that sport is a form of pleasure, fitness and entertainment. They are skeptical of sport being used to deconstruct harmful cultural norms, teaching about wildlife conservation, or its role in supporting scientific research.
The sports industry as a whole needs to do a better job at talking about what we bring to the table. How we contribute to our communities and how we can uplift everyone. By getting better at selling ourselves, it will make it easier for sport organisations to go into new communities and help them through sport.
But how do we do that?
Sport needs to be more visible off the field
Sport’s home is on the field or rink or in the pool. Sport is perhaps not a natural fit in boardrooms and roundtables. But this is where we need to be. And I think this focus on getting into new rooms needs to be on public policy discussions.
For example, I was fortunate to attend COP27 in Sharm El Sheik in Egypt in 2022, the only sports presence that I saw was a booth regarding Qatar 2022. I did hear after the fact that World Athletics and the UCI were present. There were likely more sport organisations present. That being said, as I was reading online about COP29, there appeared to be a very heavy sport presence in Baku, Azerbaijan. And there was also quite a heavy presence for sport at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland. A more consistent presence at events like this would be good.
There are other events that I see sports missing from. Public policy events like the Banff Forum often bring together a range of sectors such as government, business, law, academia, science, technology, media and the arts. I never see sport represented in these discussions. Public policy think tanks in Canada like Canada 2020 and Public Policy Forum give little thought to sport and its ability to solve policy issues.
I think it is partly a capacity issue. Sport organisations do not have the resources to dedicate to thinking about these big issues and challenges. We need dedicated organisations to do this. Grassroot organisations like Sport and Citizenship and ENGSO (European Non-Governmental Sport Organisation) are doing this work and are thinking about sport at the intersection of sport and the broader society. But both of these organisations are based in Europe. I see Canada starting to get into this game with MLSE LaunchPad in Toronto. Canada needs a more institutional sport public policy think tank that will help build up sport’s ability to advocate for itself and think about its role in tackling some of the largest issues in our communities today.
Sport can be more than just physical activity. We need to stop thinking about ourselves as being separate from the rest of society. We need to step up and be part of every and all conversation. If we truly believe that sport is inherently good, then why aren’t we proud of that and want to talk about it more?
Is Sport Inherently Good?
Across all conversations of my podcast, it has become clear that the answer to this question is a resounding no. Sport is simply not inherently good. The knowledge and understanding of benefits of sport and recreation are assumed to be broadly understood by society by many people working in the sport sector.
This is not the case. As mentioned above, when sport for development organisations have gone into communities they do not understand what and how they are trying to achieve social, environmental or economic outcomes. Members of the community see sport as a source of entertainment, fun and leisure. All of those things are of course true, but when you put values at the centre of the programming it can be so much more.
Sport is not inherently good because it can be taken advantage of by malicious actors. Just like sport can be leveraged to break down harmful gender stereotypes or being a powerful tool for reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, it can be used to discriminate, harm and further colonise marginalised communities. In the broader sense of this train of thought, this is often referred to as sport washing. This is common when hosting mega sport events to change how people view certain hosting jurisdictions, such as the 2022 Men’s FIFA World Cup held in Qatar and the 2014 Winter Olympics held in Sochi, Russia. To fight these misuses of sport, the sport sector has to be more intentional when making decisions and implementing its programming.
Sport does have some inherent goodness to it: it is fun, it does help create friendships, and there are undoubtedly mental and physical health benefits when you move your body. But is this all we want sport to mean?
What do we want sport to mean to people?
Sport without values is just entertainment. Sometimes this is okay. Modern day life is often very stressful with little opportunity for reprieve. Sport is often an escape for a lot of people. A way of spending our down time to decompress, rest and relax. One of my favourite ways of recharging is hiking in Banff National Park, or the other mountain parks close by. Which I think, in it of itself, can be a value we place upon sports, the value of rest.
Sport can be used to teach life and leadership skills. Some of these skills are taught inherently through sport to an extent, some of them require work and careful planning to be able to integrate the development of those skills. I wonder today if we are even achieving these fundamental benefits of sport. Is our sport system today too focused on high performance? Do we just blindly believe that sport will teach life skills no matter what we do? As we have just seen, sport is not inherently good. It requires work to be good.
I think everyone could agree that we want sport to be a fundamental part of our communities. Developing young people, helping people be healthy as they age and giving back to their communities by making them vibrant and thriving places for citizens to live. Yet each year we have lower and lower physical activity rates. Why? Because sport doesn’t mean the same thing as it used to. People don’t see it as fun, it has become too professionalised and institutional and we are forgetting what it is really about.
Sport is part of the human experience and we have to make sure that everyone can access it. It has to mean something more than what we are currently putting on offer.
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What do I hope for sport in 2025? I hope that we are able to take a deep look inwards and think about what we are offering our communities. We need a new sport deal to re-engage society in sport and leverage sport to tackle the issues in our very own neighbourhoods. Sport can and should take a larger role in providing solutions to our society’s problems. There is no time like the present to change our ways.
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