After being approved by the European Commission under the ERASMUS+ Sport call for projects, Green Sports Hub had its kick-off meeting in February. As the first months off the project pass by, the internal structure is being set up and initial activities of the project going ahead.

With the overall objective and aim to have this project result in a long lasting and independent platform for European sport organisations, the internal structure was set up in a way to reflect these aspirations. Beside the General Assembly, which would gather all the project partners, the project will also see periodic meetings and continuous work of additional bodies, such as the Secretariat which would oversee all the activities on a regular basis and monitor the project’s implementation, as well as ensure valorisation and exploitation of all the project’s outputs. The Sustainability Expert Group as the second body would also oversee the activities regularly but from another point of view – this body would serve as an advisory body ensuring that all the activities and outputs would match the required sustainability criteria and could be considered as innovative approaches in sports in terms of sustainability and environmental management. Worth mentioning is that ACR+ was selected to be a part of this body, beside 3 other organisations.

Activities-wise, being at its very beginning, the project will now look into existing good and exemplary practices across Europe and beyond. This mapping exercise would result in a comprehensive collection of such practices available to be used as a starting point in assessing the state-of-art of environmental management in sports and benchmarking. The accompanying research and survey among European sport organisations would look deeper into challenges, opportunities, expectations and required support European sport organisations have, what would make them more sustainable over time.

As a reminder, this project doesn’t look at a specific sport but has a very transversal approach across a multitude of different sports, from those more popular like rugby, basketball, volleyball to those with less audience but widely practices such as cycling, fitness, athletics and many more. This aspect makes the project challenging and at the same time promising in terms of results as it would be among the first such platforms in Europe that European sports could turn to, regardless the sport as the Hub would have solutions for both indoors and outdoors sports, professional and amateur and much more.