Sports Volunteering on University-Led Outreach Projects

Hayton, John (2016) Sports Volunteering on University-Led Outreach Projects. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 40 (1). pp. 38-61. ISSN 0193-7235

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723515576598

Abstract

The focus of this article centers around an established universities sports outreach program—the Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE) project—and explores how its core workforce, student volunteers, perceive that they develop effective working relationships with the project’s “hard-to-reach” clients. The SUNEE project represents an alliance between the region’s five universities to tackle social exclusion, and promote and nurture social capital and civil responsibility through the vehicle of sports. This joined-up approach to sports development provides the region’s student volunteers with vast opportunities to gain both experience and qualifications as sports coaches, mentors, and leaders by working with a range of hard-to-reach groups. To explore how the dynamics of the project influenced relationship statuses between SUNEE’s diverse participants, from the perspective of the student volunteers, this article draws upon Robert Putnam’s notion of social capital to interpret the experiences of the study’s percipients (n = 40). Captured using semi-structured interviews, students indicate that over the course of their participation in the project, social capital served both exclusionary and integrative functions, yet as time elapsed, social capital was increasingly generated between SUNEE’s diverse participants, playing a crucial role in bringing both volunteers and hard-to-reach clients together.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: social capital, hard to reach, sports-based interventions, student volunteers
Subjects: C600 Sports Science
N200 Management studies
Department: Faculties > Health and Life Sciences > Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation
Depositing User: Paul Burns
Date Deposited: 30 Sep 2019 16:01
Last Modified: 31 Jul 2021 12:02
URI: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/40929

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