South-East European Research Centre (SEERC)

SUPPORTER, “SecUring sPORTs Education thRough innovative and inclusive Gender Equality Plans,” is an EU-funded project running from April 2023 until September 2025. It aims to support eight sports higher education institutions from Central and Eastern Europe in developing their own intersectional, innovative, inclusive, and impactful Gender Equality Plans (4I-GEPs) , explicitly addressing gender-based violence and sexual harassment.

Through mutual learning and interactive exchanges, the project will seek to:

1.Identify and document systemic challenges that sports higher education institutions face in advancing gender equality and eradicating gender-based violence.

2.Develop activities tailored to each partner institution.

3.Strengthen the sports institutions’ organisational capacity to address gender equality with an intersectional approach.

4. Foster an inclusive institutional culture by developing mutual-learning processes.

5. Strengthen networking and exchange among sports institutions and with communities of practice.

6. Foster gender-related institutional, sustainable, transformative changes in the sports institutions with specific attention on the challenge of gender-based violence -thus ultimately fostering the institutions and their Gender Equality Plans’ inclusiveness and overall adherence to intersectionality.

While initially partnering with eight institutions, the SUPPORTER project aspires to target and reach the wider sports ecosystem and its various organisations in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond, and eventually contribute to wide societal changes.

Guided by inclusive and innovative epistemologies and co-creative methodologies SUPPORTER acts:

- horizontally, by fostering institutional capacity and culture based on the principles of Diversity & Inclusion within an intersectional framework, ultimately enhancing the sports institutions’ reputation, attractiveness, inclusiveness and research excellence;

- vertically, by triggering a transformative, institutional inclusive and sustainable change to sports institutions to address inequality-driven challenges and advance gender+ equality, focusing on GBV, thus also enhancing the institutions’ efforts towards meeting their gender+ equality objectives in the ERA context.

Through the vertical initiative, the SUPPORTER project will focus in the co-design and implementation of eight institutional roadmaps that will lead to the development of 4I-GEPs. By exploiting their already existing institutional GEPs as a baseline, the IOs will co-design and implement a series of actions (institutional roadmaps) gradually leading to the development of 4IGEPs tailored to the field of sports.

The multiplier effect of SUPPORTER, starting from the eight partner institutions and gradually reaching the sports ecosystem, has the long-term potential to trigger gender+ institutional change in a variety of further institutions, reaching society more broadly and contributing to wide-range systemic societal changes in line with the Ljubljana Declaration objectives.