Good Governance enhancement through e-Learning for Sport Volunteer Board Members

Good governance has been at the forefront of EU sport policy for over a decade now with The European Commission, The Council and the Council Presidencies, and the European Parliament, all taking action. In the work of all these institutions, there is extensive reference to the need to improve sport governance. All the above coined with the recent governance failures in International and high-profile sport organisations have put pressure on volunteer board members of sport organisation to improve the governance of their sport organisations. Many EU actions aiming at improving good governance in sport often focus on the big national and international sport federations and we often neglect smaller organisations that are the majority. There is, therefore, a need to provide support and to these small or even micro organisations as many of them do not have the knowledge on how to implement good governance in their organisations and they may lack the resources and the capacity to train effectively and efficiently their board members. In addition to this, the board members themselves are usually volunteers who devote their free time to the sport they love, and getting formal and structured training and education on sport governance might not fit their busy schedules. Our project the “Good Governance enhancement through e-Learning for Sport Volunteer Board Members (GReFORM)” aims to bridge this gap through education and capacity building. To achieve this an innovative, high quality, and flexible tool providing online and research-informed education has been developed for the busy volunteer board members. The project with partners both from academia and from sport organisations has analysed the needs of volunteer board members through two surveys contacted in the partner countries and has developed three main deliverables: a) an on-line Learning Portal, b) a collection of best practices and c) an electronic book (eBook) in pdf format. For the coordination and delivery of the project’s outputs, 9 transnational meetings were organised.The project consortium managed to deliver the proposed intellectual outputs at a cost lower than the budget foreseen without compromising the quality of the project but based more on the efficiency of the work performed. Moreover, it has delivered more than foreseen as the project’s outputs were translated into two more languages, French and German beyond the languages of the partners (Greek, Lithuanian, Italian, Flemish, and English). The decision to expand the translated subtitles and related transcripts to French and German was to expand the possible audience of the project with the aim to increase the potential impact of the project.The project’s results were disseminated by presenting the project in conferences such as EASM and other sport management conferences, in the Commission Expert Group INTEGRITY, by the organisation of 4 national dissemination events in Nicosia (Cyprus), Athens (Greece), Rome (Italy) and Lithuania (virtual) and a final high-level event in Brussels (Belgium).The project’s outputs can be found on the webpage of the project www.greform.eu , which the project coordinator, Cyprus Sport Organisation, has agreed to maintain after the completion of the project, and for the foreseeable future, at its own cost.