Team: Champions Ohne Grenzen
GGWCUP COPENHAGEN QUALIFIER
CHAMPION OHNE GRENZEN
Global Goal 12 - Responsible Consumption & Production
Team Champions Ohne Grenzen will be playing for Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production.
Coach Carmen Grimm knows the #magic of soccer is “the moment when the body and mind float and nothing weighs on the shoulder, when my chest expands to its full volume and my body finds its true contours.” Carmen is heading team Champions Ohne Grenzen at our Europe GGWCup.
Carmen is one of the EU Ambassador Coaches selected as part of our overall project GGWCup Europe. Learn more about the special ErasmusPlus project here and read more about Carmen here.
Champions Ohne Grenzen (CHoG) is a team that creates access to football for adult refugee women in Berlin through cost-free football practice, further leisure time activities and formations to both, their players as well as other footballing structures.
The most important goals for them are building self-confidence and community as well as reducing inequalities through fostering participation and exchange amongst women of all ages and backgrounds. For the GGWCUP they however chose to reach for a new goal: responsible consumption and production.
See you on the pitch in Copenhagen May 14!
“Needless to say, this activity is meant to make us grow closer together and create space and perspectives for active participation beyond football and thus allowing other community members to take part. Finally, this activity rhymes with our goal to provide vocational orientation for the participants – in this case, allowing for different skills to develop or show, especially by those women that have already worked in the fashion industry in their home countries before.”
How will the team take action for their Goal?
The team has decided to design and create their own football jerseys and training material with recycled goods. By doing so, they aim to develop consciousness around responsible consumption and production in their own homes and in and around the city’s sporting infrastructures. This is the story:
After having decided on our goal - we were looking for inspiration building on the experiences found on our team. There are some women who have worked in the garment industry in their home countries or others that are looking into different professional career paths, design being one of them. We thus decided to focus on the sports fashion industry, as way to learn more about global production and consumption pathways and - on the other hand - as a playing field to develop further professional skills and ways to take an active part in society.
First, we map out the trash foot print around our sporting facilities, events and material through individual and shared "waste awareness" sessions. Based on these, we are aiming to turn our stadium and its neighborhood in an environment that consumes and produces less waste and/or creates a space of ideas to reuse before waste.The project thus also aims to get the neighborhood involved and create new networks of support and connectivity between groups that have been coexisting with no real links. Also, the activities aim to involve the friends and families of the players.
Simultaneously, we approach another ngo named "Rambler studios" bridging social work and street fashion, in order to design sports fashion and material with the trash and ideas gathered at the stadium. We came up with sports bags and bibs as well as a few simple waste/fashion hacks. The jerseys will be presented step by step from May 2nd to 9th! :)
After having run the activities on a team scale, the team runs a SDG12 recycling workshop with young girls during the Easter holidays. The inner-city girls participate in a cost-free football training camp with our team introducing the #zerowaste-challenge.
These activities should be understood as the "thematic framework"/the thematic focal point to a bigger process throughout the last months in which we wanted to activate more new and elder women (with children) to an active lifestyle and build and strengthen diverse networks in the spirit of gender equality and reduced inequalities; and to pave the path of players' to transition to positions of responsibility /coaching/mentoring and to taking ownership of the activities run by the club. We thus set the goals to:
engage new coaches of refugee background themselves for a general sports practice (featuring fitness, dance, volleyball and other exercises) and recruiting actively in refugee shelters, language classes or other places
having our players participate in the "Start2Coach"-branch of our club where they get to know basic skills to become a coach/person of responsibility and having them lead the #tackletrash workshops with the young girls. The topic even inspired our first english afterschool lessons we set up for those participants that are about to face their first college degree.
Sticking to the core activities of SGD12, we ran the following activities in 2019: We ran awareness sessions on the team scale, on the scale of partnering football structures/clubs where we set up collection "stations" and with young inner-city girls participating at a girls' football camp. These activities included communal trash collection and sorting out what could be reused and what could be upcycled; it included pollution awareness and upcycling workshop sessions with the young girls and a longer process of upcycled design and production of sports material within our team.
Beyond the SDG12 framework, we set up a "start2coach" workshop in which some of our female players participated in order to make first steps in the potential transition from player to coach/person of further responsibility.
As a consequence of the "s2c"-workshop, our players took ownership of the design process and the SDG12 campaign and volunteered during a girls' football camp to introduce the #zerowaste-challenge and to run the upcycling workshop with them.
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Champions Ohne Grenzen
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