Road to 18th June: discovering community and diplomacy

Community has been one of our watchwords since the congressional phase in November 2020. Never before we feel the necessity to huddle together in a new vision of community, sharing values, feelings, and ways forward.

On June 18 at the Fulvio Bernardini Facility we will put the first brick for the construction of an open and plural community, a frank place where we can, through the development and enjoyment of sports practice, open dialogue with partners, institutions and administrations and create shared scenarios that are oftenoften unthinkable.

We have learned on the ground how sport, since the earliest modern Olympic experiences, has been able to unite where every other diplomatic maneuver has divided, it has been able to achieve results of sharing and overcoming conflicts even where spaces in that sense seemed closed. We have witnessed nations in open conflict, challenging each other on a ping-pong table, or in front of a chessboard. Leaders in atavistic contrast sitting side by side watching a soccer or baseball game. There have been athletes who have brought serious social issues to the forefront of the general public: from Tommie Smith's symbolic gesture to the athletes on the Olympic refugee team.

But even at the grassroots level, sports can do a great deal in fostering dialogue and bringing different parties around the table to promote common solutions. UISP has always done this in refugee camps in Lebanon by training teachers, teaching Senegalese fishermen how to swim, running the Vivicittà along the wall dividing Palestine or among the rubble in the aftermath of the end of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and more recently in Romania on the border with Ukraine. But UISP does this on a daily basis in the various cities of Italy by taking physical activity to prisons and the most difficult places in the various cities, but also simply in every sports facility where everyone has value as a person.

In particular, for UISP Rome the concept of Sport Diplomacy represents a tool to promote the concept of a cooperating community.

In order to get out of the health and social crisis that has hit us, the best way is to start again from the relationships of proximity, we need to reconnect threads that have been broken especially with regard to the most fragile and marginal people. Those who have suffered most from the disruption of some movement-related projects have certainly been the elderly, people with cognitive impairment, prisoners and asylum seekers/refugees, people with great difficulty (for various reasons) in staying connected with the world through the Internet.

This pandemic, and even more this war so close to us, requires us to get around a table trying to build community solidarity networks that dialogue on how to promote equal rights for all, how to improve living conditions, how to promote sociality without barriers and prejudices.

"Towards and European Sport Diplomacy project" coordinator Saska Benedicic Tomat introduces us the day under the banner of sports for all as a form of grassroots diplomacy serving the community.