The project´s design has been conceived in a participatory way by the five members of the partnership. The idea of the project rises in a first moment of the joint work between the City Council and the Basketball Club of Pedreguer and also of the need to provide cooperative work in favour of female basketball. The cooperative work needs a methodological basis to promote gender equality in sport. And this methodological basis is provided by the Inonu University, with whom the City Counci´s project office had previous contacts established by the presentation of other project proposals.

 

The Associação Desportiva Cultural e Social de Carvalhais and the Associazione Sportiva Dilettantistica Margherita Sport e Vita are added to the partnership as implementation partners of this methodology, as organizations for the exchange of experiences and, in the case of the Italian association, providing experience related to Erasmus + Sport programs.

 

Among the five organizations, they build a problem tree to identify and prioritize the needs to be addressed, a logical framework defined according to a methodology established by the project team of the Pedreguer City Council with contributions from all partners, and a final idea of the project socialized with the beneficiaries of the actions (mainly female club players and entities participating in the awareness actions). All of this is done through work meetings and surveys.

 

For the implementation phase, a management structure is created by a manager appointed by the main partner, who will coordinate a work team conformed by a representative of the other four partners in a board way. This board will hold regular meetings and will assist the coordinator, transferring experience acquired in other projects, supporting the dissemination of results and managing the execution of local activities in their countries.

 

In addition, the Pedreguer City Council supports the implementation of the Project with a technician from the area of equality and sports and with a communication expertise from the consistory. In turn, each of the partners of the project also designates a communication manager. Although the communication of the project will be centralized in the figure of the coordinating partner, each partner –through a coordinated action- will give all possible dissemination through its webs, social networks and calling to media, ensuring the presence of the graphic image of the Erasmus + Program in all the activities.

 

The board and the communication team will also ensure internal communication of the project in two levels. The first one deals with the project partners, who in addition to face-to-face meetings in the framework of the board, will communicate online in a regular basis. The second one deals with partners and stakeholders of the project, who will be informed through a newsletter in which progresses, future activities and other issues of interest will be reported. Stakeholders are considered to be those entities that, without being members of the partnership, will participate in some activities of the project (municipal schools, external speakers…).

 

External Services or expertise have to be subcontracted for the correct execution of some components of some activities when the provision by the partners is not possible. This is the case of certain training actions on gender and sports or European values and policies.

 

All the members of the consortium participate actively in the implementation of the project and assume different and complementary roles. The University of Inonu has developed the component of capacity strengthening, the City Council of Pedreguer has developed the systematization and dissemination of the experience of the partnership between the City Council and the club and the co-existent actions to involve the whole citizenry in actions to raise awareness and to promote the participation of women in basketball. In the same way, each club will be responsible for the implementation of local pilot activities to raise awareness, make it visible and promote equality through sports practices.

 

The City Council of Pedreguer assumes the tasks of coordinating the consortium and managing the project according to two criteria. The first is to enable public empowerment of the project methodology, in a cooperative manner with a club, in order to facilitate the capitalization and dissemination of experiences, mainly to municipalities of small dimensions as in the present case. The second is the public empowerment to ensure the sustainability of some components of the project, promoting that the local public bodies of each municipality are those that give continuity to certain activities and results of the project once the subsidy ends. That is why in certain actions municipal representatives of Carvalhais and Margherita di Savoia are involved.

 

In relation to the implementation of the project, since the main goal of the project is to promote participation of women in sports, and in this particular case, in female basketball, this initiative is not only focusing on players but also on coaches and future coaches.

 

The first event will be held in the University of Inonu and it will be divided in three parts. The first part will be an internal meeting of the management board. The second part will be a lecture given by a team Professors and researchers of the Sports Science Faculty of the University. They will speak and discuss with participants about the researches related to gender equality in sports in Turkey, about the situation of equal opportunities in basketball in Europe and about the ways of changing the system in order to achieve a real equality between women and men in sports. 

 

And the last part of the event will be an awareness session held as a basketball game exhibition that will be played in the basketball court of the University. High school students will be invited to attend to see the female players play and after the game the students will be able to participate in a workshop on gender balance in basketball.

 

Through this capacity building session, the participants will have had acquired the basic notions about gender equality in sports that they will need to implement and disseminate in the next events.

 

A second event will be organized and held by the Associaçao Desportiva Cultural e Social de Carvalhais in Portugal. A group of expertise from the University of Oporto (Sports Science Faculty) will give lectures on the role of women in sports and how it has changed over the past 30 years. Then the participants will have the chance to visit local schools to implement and disseminate what they have been learning in both events (awareness sessions).

A third event will be organized and held by Associazione Sportiva Dilettantistica Margherita Sport e Vita. A Convention will be held where different organizations, public authorities, a member of the Committee of Italian Sports Federation and local media will be invited to give some visibility to the project and to the promotion of participation of women in sports. An expertise of the Assist Italy Organization will carry out awareness activities.

And the last event will take place in the city of Pedreguer in Spain, where the City Council as well as the Basketball Club will be involved in the organization of the event. There will be a dynamic awareness session in local schools, where the basketball players will teach young students how to play basketball. There will also be an awareness session in the local high school, where the main topics will be gender equality in sports, integration of women and European values. An expertise in Erasmus + Programs will come for a training workshop as well as the National Spanish Agency in charge of the coordination of the Erasmus + Programs. A championship will take place in a festive and friendly atmosphere between the female players of the different organizations participating. In order to promote the participation of women in sports, the high school students will be invited as spectators to the games.

In relation to the monitoring and evaluation phase, the board will be responsible for monitoring the implementation of the project, also ensuring the quality of the activities to be carried out. It will make a quarterly progress report on the actions, as well as on the advance execution of spending. At the end of the project, final reports will be made in which the achievement of the results and budget execution will be collected. This information will be socialized through the websites of all partners.

 

The board will conceive in the first face-to-face meeting a plan of dissemination of results that will include a series of recommendations made available for future projects to be executed. In the same way, it will conceive a plan of sustainability of certain components of the project considering financial sustainability (search for resources after the end of the subsidy), structure (maintenance of the network created by the consortium), policy (empowerment by public actors, civil society and project clubs) and environment.