The Challenges of Promoting Social Inclusion through Sport: The Experience of a Sport-Based Initiative in Italy

Chiara D’Angelo,Chiara Corvino,Caterina Gozzoli

doi:10.3390/soc11020044

Abstract

Social inclusion is broadly recognized as a priority to accomplish at an international level. While the influence of sport toward this social mission has been largely debated, literature lacks contributions capturing the challenges of sport when promoting social inclusion. Based in case study methodology, the investigation explores the impact of a multi-stakeholder sport initiative developing social inclusion for socially vulnerable youth and the related challenges of the intervention through in-depth interviews with diverse program stakeholders. The main findings indicated the emergence of four challenges: limited transferability of program outcomes for youth in living conditions of severe vulnerability; drop-out of youth in living conditions of severe vulnerability; limited sustainability of program social workers; lack of sports club management skills. The work highlights some limits of sport-based programs for social inclusion and discusses some implications for practice to maximize the societal impact of such interventions.

Highlights

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In line with what has been previously exposed, literature on sport and socially vulnerable youth largely confirmed the fact that sport may develop positive social outcomes that can be associated with social inclusion, such as life skills, positive psychological capital, active citizenship, pro-social behaviors, and employment
Faced with many sports projects dedicated to promoting social inclusion, there is still limited research dedicated to the topic [23]

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. On the one hand, there is substantial agreement on the positive impact of sport at a societal level, academics argue that more research is needed in order to understand the conditions in which sport may act on social inclusion [5,6,7,8,9,10,11] The investigation of such conditions is still in its infancy [12,13,14,15] and would provide a strategic and agency-focused approach for further planning of sport-based interventions [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. For instance, Hermes and colleagues [26] highlighted whether and how sport-based interventions can develop life skills for socially vulnerable youth

Methods

Results

Conclusion