"UEFA EURO 2012 is the beginning, not the end"
Yaroslav Hrybalskyy is the chairman of t...
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By Disabled People For Disabled People
Published on 20 March 2012
Creating Inclusive Change - by Disabled People for Disabled People
UEFA is working with the Centre for Access to Football in Europe (CAFE) to deliver the UEFA EURO 2012 Respect Inclusion – Football with No Limits project. Part of this project includes the monitoring of access to public places in each host city. More than 100 project volunteers were trained to make access assessments of venues such as hotels, restaurants, public transport, and other facilities that will be visited by fans during UEFA EURO 2012.
To make the Respect Inclusion volunteers more visible and recognisable, as well as for better promotion of the project, a motivation package was developed with special Respect Inclusion branded uniforms for each volunteer.
When it came to production in Ukraine, CAFE’s local project implementing partner, the National Assembly of Disabled People, decided to involve disabled people throughout the process by placing their order with the Kiev manufacturing company Socium Plus, which employs disabled people.
Borys Volyansky, General Director of the company, says ‘There are 62 disabled employees in the company who work with modern sophisticated equipment and perform their duties to a professionally high standard. Acreative department was established to allow disabled people to suggest and implement their personal creative ideas’.
It is also worth noting that the company has been cooperating with the Football Federation of Ukraine and FC Dynamo Kyiv for the last four years, producing football team kits and football related souvenirs.
Additionally, the Socium Plus company was the first to produce and patent a full retro–collection of all team kits of FC Dynamo Kyiv, from the year of its establishment in 1927 up to 1986.
Nataliia Skrypka, Executive Director of the National Assembly of Disabled People in Ukraine, is convinced that it’s very important to involve disabled people at every stage of the implementation of the Respect Inclusion – Football with No Limits project. ‘This is a really inclusive approach which is promoted by the Respect Inclusion project’, she says.
