- The event took place as part of a training seminar for the ‘COMMUNITY’ project of the University of Barcelona.
- The activity promotes the inclusion of refugees in society and the improvement of their physical and psychological health through physical activity.
Barcelona, Friday 4 February 2022.
The University of Barcelona (UB) organised a training seminar at the Mundet Campus to publicise the Socio-Sports Meetings, a methodology that facilitates the social inclusion of refugees in Barcelona through the practice of physical exercise.
Organisations working with refugees, refugees and university students participated in the event and experienced the benefits of this methodology that uses cooperative motor-skill games, improves communication skills and promotes coexistence between culturally different groups, reducing segregation in society.
The UB has been implementing the Socio-Sports Meetings since 1993. With the ‘COMMUNITY’ project of its Faculty of Education, it seeks to transfer them to organisations that work with refugees and asylum seekers so that these people can take advantage of their physical and mental health benefits.
A dozen people participated in the seminar and the staff of the organisations learned about the key actions to design, manage and evaluate Socio-Sports Meetings. The advantage of this socio-educational intervention is that it uses very few material resources to provide many advantages for society and for the participants.
This methodology gradually and naturally gets people to open up emotionally, improve social skills and strengthen abilities to assume responsibilities and work as a team, skills that they can later transfer to their daily lives. This results in improvement in their quality of life.
This intervention model also works on issues such as racism, discrimination and xenophobia, which are obstacles to healthy coexistence in the multicultural societies in which we currently live.
Implemented by the UB and funded by the European Commission, the ‘COMMUNITY’ project creates community and promotes the social inclusion of refugees and asylum seekers, using sports activity as a tool for social transformation. This seminar was organised as part of this project, together with the IDP-ICE and Fundació Solidaritat UB.
Photographs of the seminar
