The backbone of the project is the Socio-Sports Meetings, where refugees and volunteers share physical activities to improve their social, cognitive, emotional and motor skills.
The Socio-Sports Meetings are an established socio-educational intervention model that has been developed since 1993 between the following organisations:
- Faculty of Education of the University of Barcelona.
- Government of Catalonia’s Secretariat of Criminal Measures, Reintegration and Care for Victims.
- Mental Health Federation of Catalonia.
- Support program for refugees and people from conflict zones of the University of Barcelona.
- Fundació Solidaritat of the University of Barcelona.
- Organisations representing young people in socially difficult situations.
The Meetings are free of charge and are held in Barcelona every Wednesday, from 4 pm to 6.30 pm, at the CEM Can Ricart of Barcelona. You can register by filling out this short form.
What are Socio-Sports Meetings?
They are meetings where volunteers and refugees meet to carry out sports activities and have fun together. The people who participate play cooperative motor-skill games that require them to interact. They have to help and support each other to achieve the goal of each game.
Cooperative motor-skill games
Unlike some sports, these physical games leave competition aside and thereby become a means of interaction and cooperation that helps the participants to communicate, interrelate and socialise. Motivation for social interaction increases, boosting coexistence within the group.
The result is a significant life experience for all the participants, who experience feelings of closeness with each other and mutual camaraderie.
Who are the Socio-Sports Meetings aimed at?
The activity takes place weekly, each Wednesday at 4 pm at the Mundet Campus of the University of Barcelona. Therefore, it is addressed to people residing in the province of Barcelona:
- Refugees and people from conflict zones.
- University students who want a pragmatic learning experience while performing community service.
- Professionals interested in learning to design socio-sports activities.
- Volunteers who want to work on topics such as empowerment, coexistence, positive conflict management, critical thinking or interculturality.
- But, above all, people who want to meet people and have a good time, laughing and exercising! Everyone is welcome!
What do we do at the Socio-Sports Meetings?
The Meetings are held in Barcelona every Wednesday at 4 pm. They last approximately 2.5 hours according to the following programme:
Reception
The participants meet in the gymnasium of the Mundet Campus of the University of Barcelona, where educational professional Laura Tomàs explains the activity to them and puts it in context.
Motor-skill activities
The group then carries out the activities, which last from 1.5 to 2 hours. During this time, the educational professional proposes different physical and sports games to the participants with cooperative and very fun objectives.
Evaluation
When the motor-skill games are over and the group’s relationships are more fluid, the participants jointly assess how the Meeting went. This is a calm and relaxed moment when they can express their impressions and feelings about the experience. It usually lasts between 10 and 20 minutes.
Snacks
This is followed by an informal picnic lasting about 30 minutes, where participants can chat in a relaxed manner and get to know each other better. The conversation is accompanied by food and drink. This is a very valuable moment because it develops the group’s social skills.
*By participating in the Meetings, professionals learn to design socio-sports activities with a methodology based on physical activity that is developed for service learning.
*Participants can request a certificate of attendance, which is useful for demonstrating social integration for legal purposes.
The Meetings are free of charge and are held in Barcelona every Wednesday, from 4 pm to 6.30 pm, at the CEM Can Ricart of Barcelona. You can register by filling out this short form.
Origins of the Socio-Sports Meetings
Since 1993
The Socio-Sports Meetings have been held at the University of Barcelona since 1993. They were created by Merche Ríos, a professor in the Department of Applied Didactics of the Faculty of Education.
At first, the Meetings were held with students from the Faculty of Education and people deprived of liberty. The same methodology was later applied to people with mental health problems. Since 2015, they have also been carried out with refugees and people from conflict zones.
Throughout these years, over 8,000 students have participated in the Socio-Sports Meetings, shaking hands with 8,000 people deprived of liberty or with mental health problems.
International scope
These Meetings have had such an impact that the socio-educational model of Professor Merche Ríos has been replicated in other universities in Catalonia and elsewhere in Spain, as well as in other countries in Central and South America, like Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Cuba.
These activities are the seed of our ‘COMMUNITY’ project, where we hold Socio-Sports Meetings with refugees and university students, volunteers, and professionals who want to incorporate the methodology.
Methodology of the Socio-Sports Meetings
Socio-educational intervention
The Socio-Sports Meetings are based on a socio-educational intervention model based on cooperative physical activity and the service learning methodology.
This intervention model helps to empower the participants and improve their social, cognitive, emotional and motor abilities. The ‘COMMUNITY’ project also facilitates peer interaction between people at risk of social exclusion and volunteers.
The motor-skill games use an active, participatory, democratic and transformative methodology characterised by the use of teamwork as a common thread to promote critical thinking, dialogue, respect and the assumption of responsibilities within the context of service learning.
Service learning
Service learning is “an educational approach that combines learning objectives with community service to provide a pragmatic and progressive learning experience while meeting the needs of society”.
In other words, service learning methodology is an educational practice that combines learning processes with service to the community that helps to train volunteers and turns them into agents of socialisation that promote the inclusion of refugees in society. Service learning is education based on personal experience and experimentation that encourages the participants to actively participate, cooperate and reflect.
In conclusion, our methodology uses sport as a tool to drive social transformation and introduces civic engagement at the heart of action through service learning to socially include refugees in host communities and provide learning based on practice and experience, which is known as learning by doing.
Benefits and skills acquired in Socio-Sports Meetings
Socio-sports Meetings entail benefits for the refugees, volunteers and professionals who participate, as well as for society:
Benefits for all participants
- Socio-sports Meetings improve all participants’ interpersonal skills, ability to solve problems and ability to work as a team.
- They build their social, cognitive and emotional capacities.
- They facilitate communication, interrelation and socialisation.
- They facilitate physical well-being and improve motor skills.
- They allow the participants to work on topics such as empowerment, coexistence, positive conflict management, critical thinking, interculturality and intergenerational relationships, as well as racism, discrimination, segregation and xenophobia.
- They provide an open attitude to the diversity of people, helping to overcome the stigmatisation that surrounds people in situations of social exclusion and dismantling the prejudices that are produced by ignorance.
- They help to establish social relationships based on respect and acceptance of differences between people.
- They improve knowledge and mutual understanding between refugees and the host community.
Benefits for refugees
- Socio-sports Meetings promote the social inclusion of refugees in the host community.
- They improve their quality of life.
- They encourage communication and expression, as well as learning the language of the host community.
- They develop social skills to adapt to new environments and cultures.
- They improve understanding of the culture of the host society and their relationship with it as a result.
- They encourage decision-making and the assumption of responsibilities through empowerment.
- They allow them to learn to work as a team through negotiation and positive conflict resolution to achieve group objectives.
- They help them to assume responsibilities, make decisions and improve the ability to take the initiative to successfully achieve different objectives.
- They allow the participants to acquire the habit of practicing sport through recognition of its physical and psychological benefits and how it improves their quality of life.
- They provide accreditation from the University of Barcelona, which is useful for demonstrating social integration for legal purposes.
Benefits for students and professionals
- Learn to design socio-sports activities with a methodology based on physical activity.
- Plan learning processes in the context of social exclusion.
- Acquire basic resources to implement socio-educational intervention activities through motor-skill games.
- Direct the teaching process with strategies to promote learning, social inclusion, interaction and socialisation.
- Learn group energisation techniques through physical and sports activities.
- Achieve the capacity for ethical and responsible social commitment to people’s well-being and particularly those at risk of social exclusion.
- Develop an attitude open to the diversity of people, confronting the stigmatisation of refugees through critical and constructive analysis of discrimination, segregation, racism and xenophobia.
- Acquire communication and expression skills to connect with people and resolve conflicts using assertive communication, generating dialogue to promote coexistence.
- Self-reflect on socio-educational interventions as a learning instrument, self-evaluate them to make continuous improvements and analyse the effectiveness of physical activity as an educational resource.
The Meetings are free of charge and are held in Barcelona every Wednesday, from 4 pm to 6.30 pm, at the CEM Can Ricart of Barcelona. You can register by filling out this short form.
Join us!
The ‘COMMUNITY’ project has come to an end and, with it, the Socio-Sports Meetings. This project has been developed over 3 years (2021 to 2023) and the last meeting took place on 20 December 2023.
We can only thank all the participants and entities that have supported this initiative to promote social inclusion of refugees. Without all of you it would not have been possible, thank you very much! We hope to see you in future initiatives.