Football For Future x Generation Amazing
This month Football For Future will be partnering with Generation Amazing to deliver our education workshops to young people at the annual Generation Amazing Festival in Qatar, the week before the FIFA World Cup 2022 begins. In consultation with our board and core leadership team, two primary factors emerged as reasons why this project aligns with our Theory of Change:
1. It’s an excellent opportunity to deliver impact.
This project is in pursuit of one of our core aims of raising awareness of climate change and positively influencing attitudes and behaviours regarding environmental sustainability amongst the football community. Our monitoring and evaluation shows our workshops are successful in delivering positive results across all measured impact metrics, so we are excited to take our work to football’s biggest stage. The long term impact of educating young football fans on environmental sustainability means raising their expectations of climate action from the football industry, normalising environmentally sustainable behaviours, and driving climate action in their respective places of work and/or local communities into the future.
With attendees representing all 32 participating FIFA World Cup 2022 countries, we saw value in the internationality of the festival allowing us to discuss climate change both with individuals from less climate conscious countries, and also with participants from countries where the effects of human-caused climate change are already being felt.
Beyond the workshop itself, we also saw this project as a necessary opportunity for Football For Future. The FIFA World Cup 2022 will attract significant industry stakeholders - from national & continental FAs, to FIFA itself - with whom we seldom have the chance to share spaces with. We believe that the standard and profile of this project will open doors for us to deliver future projects with other elite football industry partners, both domestically and globally.
2. We’re all on the same team for this one.
Football For Future exists to make itself redundant. By this we mean that we do not exist just to work with stakeholders who are knocking on the door of climate or environmental sustainability perfection. We relish the opportunity to work with partners across football who have exciting and untapped potential to make environmentally sustainable progress in their operations and climate communication - and this is how we have worked to date.
It would be hypocritical for Football For Future to partner with some of the biggest sports brands in the world, with the largest environmental footprints, or oligarch-owned clubs (both of which we have worked with and will continue to do so), but then refuse to work in Qatar because of high-profile debates surrounding the tournament. We believe that football is one of the most powerful tools in the world for achieving environmental and social justice, and working with some of the sport’s most influential stakeholders will be key to this process.
We also acknowledge that this isn’t the only way to work in the sector, and other organisations will have different approaches and opinions - and this is healthy for the climate and social justice movements at large.
No individual or organisation in football is perfect (including us!) - and we exist to work with partners who want to use their platforms to raise awareness of climate change, educate themselves, and improve their own environmental sustainability performance. We will never reach our necessary climate targets if we leave people behind. We’re all on the same team for this one.
Ultimately, we decided to take on this project - without a fee (only our expenses will be covered) - because we believe that there is value in Football For Future being in the room to engage participants in the climate conversation in a way that they may never have experienced before, because it will be the defining issue of their generation.