Western suburbs councils and sporting bodies have partnered with Victoria University for a research project aimed at increasing the amount of migrants and refugees involved in local sport.
Wyndham Basketball, Volunteer West, Welcoming Australia and Brimbank City Council joined 66 clubs from 12 different sports across the west in collaborating in VU’s Change Makers Melbourne’s West (CMMW) project.
The three year research project led by VU’s Professor Ramon Spaaij, Professor Brent McDonald, Associate Professor Fiona McLachlan, and Dr Carla Luguetti, involved clubs identifying barriers to them having more diverse members and developing strategies to overcome them.
They include: hosting ‘come and try’ days in collaboration with community groups and producing club information in a range of languages; setting up youth advisory committees and gender equity policies to increase female board members and coaches; the creation of much-needed supportive spaces for club leaders across different sports to share their
experiences, learn from each other and from research, and improve their knowledge, skills, and confidence in driving social inclusion initiatives within their clubs and having zero tolerance to racism.
Project leader, professor Ramon Spaaij said the project was about assisting clubs that wanted to be more inclusive but didn’t have the knowledge or resources on how to go about it and as well as helping clubs identify that they had a problems with inclusion and diversity to begin with.
“One of the big take aways is that clubs often feel they’re doing really well,” said professor Spaaj whose team used a climate assessment tool that measured areas such as accessibility, representation, the facilities and lived experiences of existing diverse members to determine how inclusive each club was.
He said club leaders were often surprised by the results.
“Often then they would say we thought we were here but we’ve noticed we’ve got serious gaps to work on.”
Processor Spaaj said a key to improving migrant and refugee membership and making sporting clubs more inclusive, was for them to be aware of the communities in the surrounding area.
“One of the things we worked on is to really understand your demographics. Be aware of the demographics of the area of where your club is and are not reflected in your club membership,”
he said.
Now that the research project is over, Professor Spaaj said the challenge was maintaining the positive changes that have been made and spreading them beyond the western suburbs.
“How can we scale it up, how can we make it Victoria wide or interstate and how can we sustain it?”
Cade Lucas
