Watch our 2017 Season's Greetings video here.

ISCA President Mogens Kirkeby looks ahead to 2018.

All year round, ISCA’s members are delivering accessible and affordable recreational sport and physical activities to millions of citizens across the world. Being able to deliver such a large amount of activities on an ongoing basis relies on three elements:

1. A lot of devoted people – many of them working as volunteers
2. Well-governed organisations with high capacities of leadership
3. Strong advocacy to ensure that individual organisations can keep delivering in the future

Human resources – volunteers or paid staff – are very important, and we are all aware that having the right people on board is crucial.

Good governance is becoming increasingly important. We see a lot of governance problems among the major international sport organisations that focus on professional sport. Some of these still have a long way to go towards demonstrating good governance.

But good governance in the recreational sport and physical activity sector is actually more important than how the international professional sport organisations perform. The simple reason is that the grassroots sport organisations deliver activities to many more people on a daily basis than elite sport. I am of the opinion that our abilities to properly govern and lead the organisations that so many citizens benefit from and depend on is vital to the existence of our sector.

Advocacy

The third crucial element is advocacy. Advocacy is the term that includes the many ways of promoting our sector and convincing relevant stakeholders that our activities and missions are important. For many ISCA members, public political institutions at a municipal or state level are significant targets for this advocacy, but it could also be other stakeholders, such as potential partners or sponsors, that are the key to their growth and prosperity.

Climb the agendas

Knowing that grassroots sport and recreational physical activity are not at the top of the political agenda, there are two primary ways to deal with advocacy: You can promote your case and own agenda or you can ‘jump onto’ higher ranking agendas.

Many organisations do a very good job in promoting their activities. However, in some cases it is needed to utilise other sectors or ‘hot’ political topics to gain more momentum. For example, our ‘Moving People’ sector strongly contributes to public health, education, the environment and employment. Advocacy is about making these connections clear to decision makers.

Advocating for the Human Right to Move is about showing that delivering accessible and affordable recreational sport and physical activities to millions of citizens is part of the solution. So why not invest more in this solution!