Football 4 Peace Training week 'a great success'

40 Chelsea students worked alongside 35 arabic and jewish coaches from Israel in a five day training conference. The training conference is now an annual event and is supported by the University of Brighton and the projects partners, The British Council in israel and the Israel Sports Authority. Staff from Chelsea School working on the project coached football skills and ran a series of activities encouraging team building, trust and problem solving to the new recruits to the project. John Lambert, Senior Lecturer in PE at Chelsea has developed a coaching manual to encourage soccer coaches to use football skills to promote co-existence and unity in teams which forms the backbone of the training given to the volunteers. Alongside this, Senior Lecturer, Gary Stidder with project co-ordinator Graham Spacey and Adrian Haasner, Lecturer at the German School of Sports in Cologne have began developing a similar manual for off pitch / non-football based activities. The volunteers from the UK will be in Israel this summer supporting their Israeli counterparts in delivering the Football 4 Peace co-existence curriculum based on these manuals to 1200+ children from both jewish and arab communities.
The 5 days ended with a tournement moddelled on the Football 4 Pecace Festival to be held in Tel Aviv the day before England play Israel in the European Nations qualifier. Over 100 children from Broad Oak and Horam Youth Football club were coached by the Israeli and UK volunteers and then led through a 6 a side competition where the 'FAIR PLAY' award was the thing to win. Co-ordinator Graham Spacey stated that the aim was to remind the children that football and winning was not the 'thing'. 'Football and competition are merely tools the project uses to bring people together and develop mutual respect and understanding between them.'.