Football 4 Peace
Football 4 Peace International (F4P) is an activity-based community relations and reconciliation initiative. Sports coaches, community leaders and volunteers, work alongside each other bringing differing communities together through a variety of sports and aspects of outdoor education.
The project began in 2001 bringing together Jewish and Arab communities in Israel and today has worked and impacted on programmes in Jordan, Palestine, South Africa, Germany, Ireland, Northern Ireland and England.
The University of Brighton is the founding partner of F4P and facilitates training, mentoring, research, monitoring and evaluation and providing opportunities for student volunteers within a variety of sport for development and peace initiatives across the world. The curriculum and coaching methodology devised by the initiative promotes intimate interaction, allowing longer-term relationships and cross-community understanding to flourish.
The aims are fourfold:
- Provide opportunities for social contact across community boundaries;
- Promote mutual understanding;
- Engender in participants a desire for and commitment to peaceful coexistence;
- Enhance sporting skills and technical knowledge
The coaching package was created under the leadership by staff at the university’s School of Sport and Service Management. The package does not emphasise skill development, but more importantly focuses on a values based approach to learning which demands high levels of co-operation and interaction. Values such as trust, Respect, responsibility, equity and inclusion.
Dr. Gary Stidder, Principal Lecturer explained: “When used properly sport can be a great device for bringing people together, particularly the young. Through our experiences in Israel we learnt that while the children loved playing together, many were less comfortable with the non-sport based, conflict resolution activities, often in a classroom setting that had been planned for them before or after the activities. We looked at what the communities wanted to achieve and worked with them to design a way of doing that. Simply playing together wasn’t giving them the skills needed to open up dialogue or lasting relationships off the pitch. Changing the approach to coaching and its emphasis from skill development to developing and promoting positive values was the way forward.”
The project strives to stimulate interaction, awareness and mutual understanding between people of influence in the communities where it operates which includes training community and sports leaders, often in Eastbourne. Professor John Sugden said of a training exercise at the University of Brighton campus in Eastbourne:
“While we have little doubt that in the short term the children, not to mention our own students, get a great deal of satisfaction and positive experience from the F4P projects on the ground, we are also concerned to ensure that what we achieve can have a longer lasting effect.
"One way of doing this is to foster better relations and friendships between those responsible for planning and operating sport and related youth and community projects all year round. We hope that in addition to the actual coach-education, having our guests spend a period of time away from the constant reminders of conflict, rooming together and learning to get to grips with another culture will promote the kind of relationships that will endure once they return home.
The unique nature of the F4P coaching methodology is in its flexibility. As Graham Spacey, Project Officer notes “the model developed is sensitive and adaptable to various places and situations and those trained have the skills to use the methodology within their own work independently. It has been adopted by teachers to simply foster bonds between new intakes of pupils and to teach good citizenship; by advocacy groups such as the Justin Campaign to raise awareness of homophobia in sport through community festivals; and by governing bodies, clubs and councils to develop their coaches working in various community settings or running inclusion programmes for minority groups such as travelers, the disabled, girls, immigrants and refugees.”
Watch Football 4 Peace in action as children from the Eastbourne area learn that football isn’t just about winning.
Further information can be found on the Football 4 Peace website
