S06: External Actor and Community Support for the Development of Health Promotion in Sports Clubs

Abstract

Purpose: Sports clubs can play a key role in promoting health to members and the wider community. To embrace this, sports clubs require support, knowledge, and guidance from multiple external stakeholders, such as sports federations, municipalities, state sports organisations and universities. This symposium aims to shed light on how external actors collaborate to help grassroots sports clubs increase their health promoting initiatives through training, education, guidance, and support.

Methods: This symposium includes five presentations illustrating different facets of external support for the development of health promotion in sports clubs. The first presentation highlights how Danish professional football clubs collaborated with municipalities and local communities using the participatory systems approach. The second presentation examines the sustainability and scalability of the ‘More than a Club’ initiative in Ireland, with a focus on community support and goodwill towards football clubs. The third presentation discusses the development of a response system created for community sports clubs to address gender-based violence through collaborations with the Regional Sport Assembly in Victoria, Australia. The fourth presentation explores existing training courses in Europe aimed at educating sports coaches to effectively promote health. The fifth presentation discusses the development of a how-to implementation guide designed for sports club management to integrate health promotion into their club.

Results: The audience of the symposium is invited to exchange with presenters their knowledge and experience on external support needed for sports clubs to fully embrace their role as settings for health promotion. The discussant questions how sports clubs can improve their collaboration capacity to involve external partners for better health promotion initiatives.

Conclusion: The symposium contributes to recommendations from research to practice on how sports organisations can better collaborate with external stakeholders to promote health. Focusing on collaboration efforts with multiple stakeholders will increase capacity, knowledge, and implementation of health promotion initiatives. This symposium highlights regional and European collaborations to increase the health promotion capacity of sports club actors.

Support/Funding Source: Each presentation has individual funding. The symposium is part of the HEPA Working Group: Promoting Physical Activity and Health in Sports Clubs.

Keywords: Sports clubs, health promotion, community, collaboration, physical activity