Community sport: making sport a tool for social change in your area

By Géraldine Heinen4 September 202612 min read

A municipality that wants to rebuild social ties in a neighbourhood, a social welfare service that seeks to get young people moving towards employment, a province that wants to fight the isolation of older people: all of them can rely on sport, provided they do so with method. That is what community sport covers, a field that has just given itself a common definition and solid reference points. This article explains what community sport means, what separates an action that produces results from a simple good intention, where French-speaking Belgium stands, and how a local authority, a federation or a club builds a community sport project in its area.

1. What community sport means

Community sport (in French, "socio-sport") refers to all the actions that use sport and physical activity in the service of social and societal purposes. The French consortium "Social impact through sport", which brought together three field associations and four researchers to give the field a shared definition, puts it this way: community sport uses "sport as a tool for achieving a diversity of social purposes". Sport is "a means and not an end".

This wording changes the way we look at a sports activity. In a traditional club, the objective is the practice itself: improving, playing, competing with others. In a community sport action, the objective lies elsewhere, in health, employability, school success, the cohesion of a neighbourhood or the inclusion of people with disabilities. Sport becomes the vehicle for reaching that goal, because it creates connection, trust, regularity and enjoyment where other approaches struggle to reach people.

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2. Who it is for

Community sport is aimed first and foremost at people facing poverty, exclusion or social, health, educational or professional difficulties. In practice, this means young people who are far from school or employment, isolated people, families living in poverty, people with disabilities, older people, people on a migration journey, people followed by the justice system or by mental health services.

This targeting is what gives community sport its value for an area. A municipality knows its vulnerable groups through its social welfare service, its social cohesion plan, its schools, its youth centres and its associations. Sport offers it a gateway to these people, often more natural and less stigmatising than a counter, because people come first to move and to get together.

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3. The six markers of a community sport action

The consortium identified six markers that make it possible to recognise a community sport action, and to distinguish it from an ordinary sports activity or a simple communication operation. The first four are entry criteria; the last two are the ones that make the difference between a good intention and an action that produces results.

For a local authority, this grid is an immediate decision-making tool. It makes it possible to look at a project proposal and ask, point by point, whether the intention is written down, whether the target groups are named, whether the objective meets a local policy, whether the area is precise, whether a method exists and whether the right partners are around the table. An action that ticks the first four points deserves support; an action that also ticks the last two deserves long-term funding.

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4. The social impact of sport is built

The most important point of this whole framework fits in one sentence: the social effects of sport depend on the target groups, the objectives, the quality of supervision, the resources, the duration of the support and the local context. In other words, putting people on a pitch produces an activity; it is the way that activity is designed and supervised that produces change.

International work says the same thing. Since the United Nations 2030 Agenda, adopted in 2015, sport has been recognised as an "important enabler of sustainable development". The analyses carried out in this framework recall that sport, on its own, rarely keeps its promises, and that results rest on an explicit strategy, an analysis of the local context, community involvement and coordination between actors. In February 2026, the Commonwealth published the first global baseline report on the contribution of sport to the Sustainable Development Goals, based on data from 210 countries. One of its findings deserves to be remembered by every local authority: fewer than a third of national sports policies are currently aligned with these goals, which leaves a wide margin for progress, and a place to be taken by the areas that get started.

This finding is good news for organisations willing to work with method. Since impact is built, it can be designed, tracked and demonstrated. That is exactly what funders, public and private alike, expect, and what we detail in our article on sustainability reporting in sport.

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5. More than a century of history, a recent structuring

The social use of sport goes back to the end of the 19th century, with popular education movements and parish youth clubs. The 1980s marked a turning point: sport gradually became a tool for locally based social intervention, mobilised in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The 1990s and 2000s saw the rise of specialised associations, which gradually professionalised their practices. Since the 2020s, the field has entered a phase of structuring: common definition, formalisation of jobs and skills, evaluation, institutional recognition and scaling up.

In France, this structuring translated into an interministerial circular in 2019, roadmaps on employment and employability in sport in 2022, and the work of the "Social impact through sport" consortium, which mapped four categories of jobs, skill blocks common to the sport, social work and youth work sectors, and evaluation tools. It is this framework that we take up here, because it is the most developed in the French language and transfers well to our reality.

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6. Where French-speaking Belgium stands

Community sport exists in Wallonia and Brussels, but it rarely goes by that name, and that is what makes it hard to see, to fund and to evaluate. Three observations help map the landscape.

Sport is already a lever of local policies

The Social Cohesion Plan, organised by the decree of 22 November 2018, brings together 195 plans covering 204 Walloon municipalities, with a regional budget of 23 million euros for the 2020-2025 programme, supplemented by municipal co-funding of at least 25%. It is organised around seven fundamental rights, including the right to health and the right to social, cultural and family fulfilment, two areas in which many municipalities include sports activities, without sport being named as such in the scheme. The programme has been extended until the end of 2026, and a simplifying reform is announced for what follows: it is an opportunity, for the municipalities that wish to do so, to include sport explicitly, with objectives and indicators.

The Wallonia-Brussels Federation has also labelled 133 "sporting municipalities", and ADEPS has supported since 2010 the "My club, my school" programme, which funds the discovery of disciplines by pupils. These schemes create bridges between clubs, schools and municipalities; they provide a base onto which a social intention can be grafted.

Field actors exist, especially in Brussels

Several Brussels associations support every year hundreds, sometimes thousands of young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods, combining free sports activities, individual mentoring and preparation for employment, with results measured in numbers of young people back in training or in work. Foundations, including the King Baudouin Foundation, support projects that combine street-based social work and sport. The adapted sport federation recognised by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation structures, for its part, the inclusion of people with disabilities. These initiatives show that the model works here, and that it remains largely to be rolled out outside the big cities.

What is still missing

What France has just built is still lacking in French-speaking Belgium: a shared definition of community sport, recognition of the specific skills of supervisors, a culture of evaluation, and formalised partnerships between the sports department and the social cohesion department of the same municipality, which often pursue similar objectives without coordinating. A club, a municipality or a province wishing to launch a community sport project therefore finds itself without a local frame of reference. The reference points presented in this article aim precisely to fill this gap.

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7. Building a community sport project in your area

A successful community sport project rests on a clear allocation of roles. The local authority carries the intention and the knowledge of the area; clubs and associations bring the activity, the supervision and the local connection; funders have a readable framework and results to show. The five steps below describe this journey while specifying who does what. To put them into practice, we provide a community sport project template (Word template to adapt), which takes up each step in the form of fields and tables to complete with your partners.

Step 1: formulate the intention and name the target groups

The municipality, the social welfare service or the federation writes in a few lines the social change sought and the people concerned: for example, reducing the isolation of older people in a given neighbourhood, or getting young people aged 16 to 25 who are not in employment or training moving again. This short, precise wording will guide all subsequent decisions and bring the partners together around a common objective.

Step 2: establish the diagnosis

The area already knows a great deal about its target groups, through the social cohesion plan, social welfare data, schools and associations. The diagnosis consists in gathering this knowledge, listening to the people concerned and identifying what already exists in terms of sports provision, facilities and skills. It is also the moment to spot the clubs ready to commit and to check that they offer a safe, welcoming and respectful environment, the first condition for welcoming vulnerable groups.

Step 3: set the objectives and the indicators

Each objective is translated into a few simple indicators, defined before the launch: number of regular participants and their profile, attendance, observed change on the social purpose (return to training, participation in other neighbourhood activities, self-reported well-being), satisfaction of participants and partners. Indicators decided in advance and tracked consistently are worth far more than an assessment reconstructed after the fact.

Step 4: bring the partners together and allocate roles

The local authority coordinates; one or more clubs run the sessions; a social service ensures the link with the people and their support beyond sport; a school, a youth centre or a health centre acts as a relay. Everyone knows what they bring, what they receive and who they report to. This allocation is written into an agreement, even a simple one, which also provides for the training of supervisors on the groups welcomed.

Step 5: track over time, report and adjust

A community sport project is a long-term undertaking, and monitoring is planned from the start: for a one-year project, a progress report every three months makes it possible to check that things are on track and to correct course before the end; for a multi-year project, one progress report per year, with a lighter check mid-year, plays the same role. Each report compares the indicators with the interim targets set in step 3, notes what worked well and what was difficult, and sets the decisions for the following period. At the end of the project, the indicators are consolidated in a final report, shared with the partners and funders, which describes what was done, what it produced and what will be adjusted. This report feeds the municipality's communication, its partners' reporting and the decision to renew the action. It turns a one-off project into a lasting policy. The community sport project template in fact ends with a check against the six markers, to be repeated at each review.

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8. Funding and making it last

A well-built community sport project has several sources of funding, often combinable. The Social Cohesion Plan remains the first door for a Walloon municipality, particularly in view of its reform. Foundations, including the King Baudouin Foundation, regularly launch calls for projects on inclusion, youth or health, to which a well-argued sports action fully responds. The European Union's Erasmus+ Sport programme funds social inclusion projects through sport, including for small organisations, provided they partner with organisations from other countries. Finally, impact sponsorship is of growing interest to companies looking for concrete, measurable projects aligned with their social responsibility strategy; we explain what they expect in our article on impact sponsorship.

One last avenue deserves the attention of local authorities: pooling. When a local authority funds support from which several clubs in its area benefit, each of them gains access to training, tools and follow-up it could not have afforded alone, and the municipality has a network of clubs ready to welcome vulnerable groups. That is the logic of our Club Engagé programme, and it applies just as well to a community sport project.

Community sport offers local areas a powerful tool, as strong as the method put into it. A clear intention, named target groups, partners who talk to each other, prepared supervisors and tracked results: that is what turns a sports activity into a lever for social change.

Sources: "Impact social par le sport" consortium, review of work (definition and six markers, in French); F. Coalter, "sport plus" / "plus sport" distinction; United Nations, Strengthening the global framework for leveraging sport for development; Commonwealth, global baseline report on sport and the SDGs (February 2026); Union of Walloon Cities and Municipalities, the Social Cohesion Plan (in French); Wallonia-Brussels Federation, sporting municipality label and ADEPS programmes.

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