Sports and Outreach

[The Jay]

Personally, I am not a sports fan. Sure, I go through phases where I pay attention but they always end. This is not the case for many people that I know; sports are everywhere. You cannot get away from them so you either love them or learn to live alongside them. I have done the latter for the majority of my life. My point is that if we could use the language of sports or the values associated with them to show our points then we could have some luck with more people.

The thing that prompted this thread is that I found this (http://www.akpress.org/one-game-at-a-time.html).

Has anyone had any luck using the themes of sports in explaining leftist positions or have you never considered doing so? I'm looking forward to feedback.

[shantaram]

Would be interesting to find out the techniques used as sport really is a universal language which can help break social/cultural boundaries.

I was part of a small organisation called 'football beyond borders' (I can't insert a link due to lack of posts) which did exactly that, we used football to tackle those boundaries.

This was the mission statement:


We believe that prejudice and discrimination are born from a lack of understanding and experience, and the best way to overcome this is through the use of shared cultural mediums. We believe football to be one of the most powerful cultural mediums of them all, a truly global language which is spoken throughout the world.
In our global community, the need for cross-cultural dialogue and exchange has never been more apparent, and a decade after the UN's Global Development Compact, it is once again time to examine and build global ties amongst the world's future leaders. Football, the world's global game, is capable as a passion, an experience and a language to transcend socio-cultural boundaries and act as a shared medium through which to achieve dialogue and understanding.

Sport really is a cheap/easy way of helping the community come together and enjoy a passion, to be able to exploit it for further political messages would be great.

Has anyone read the book/shed further light?

[The Jay]

The book isn't out yet.