An interview with Borbála Takács
Borbála is a very committed member of BAIS, also a project coordinator since 2019, who is working on an Erasmus+ project, called Sport Sense. Check out the latest blog piece about her background, her connection to sport and also the projects she is leading.
Please, tell me more about your connection to sports and background!
I got my BSc degree at the University of Physical Education studying Recreation management and health promotion, where I also gained a volleyball coach certification. And since my main focus of interest has always been how sport can have an effect on social changes, especially on the social inclusion process of marginalized groups and minorities, I continued to study Intercultural Psychology and Education at ELTE. After graduation I got familiar with the existence of NGOs, and I got to learn how amazing it is to work for positive social changes in a very non-formal environment, such as the civil sector. During my studies, I conducted an internship at Artemisszió Foundation and at an Italian association called Ya Basta Association, and after graduation, I started to work for Hungarian NGOs like Oltalom Sport Association and Subjective Values Foundation and as an ongoing side-project, I’ve worked a few years as a volleyball coach.
What is your connection to BAIS?
I’ve met with BAIS during a project meeting, and I immediately got involved in two projects called MOVE and EYESS in 2019.
I appreciated all the non-formal learning opportunities that BAIS provided, as well as the inclusive and diverse community that BAIS created in Budapest, which is in my opinion is very unique.
"There is no such organization in Hungary which would be able to involve so many foreigners together with Hungarians in very cool recreational sport activities."
At BAIS my main responsibility was to organize Mondiali Sport Festival in 2020, which was very challenging due to the covid-19 pandemic, but we had a very nice team and the board and the members of BAIS have helped a lot.
What are your responsibilities as a project coordinator?
This year I am working as the project coordinator of the project called Sport Sense, where our aim is to organize inclusive sport events for visually impaired and blind people together with those who doesn’t have any visual impairment. In the framework of this project, we will create a guidebook as well to support organizations who wish to organize such sports events, and we will also organize a study visit in Budapest in September, and a training course in Romania later in October and November. Please, stay tuned, because application of participants will open to these two international events very soon.
Can you tell me about the Sport Sense project and its phases in general?
The way this project works is that first there is a project writing phase – in the case of this project this process was led by the main coordinators, a Romanian association called Scout Society. They reached out to BAIS, and asked us tThe secondo be partners in this project, and one of BAIS’s members – most likely Bence, Era or Barni - supported the application process from our side.
The project implementation generally consists of 4 main “work packages”. One of them is the management, the coordination, communication with partners and the participation at partners’ meetings. In this project, we just had our kick off meeting very recently in July – due to the pandemic, it had to be postponed by 5 months… Besides communicating with the partners it also important to administrate every offline and online activities properly.
Second part of an Erasmus+ Sport project is the organization of local activities such as inclusive sports events, and the organization of study visits and or training courses. In the case of this project, we are responsible for organizing and hosting a study visit in Budapest, since within this partnership, BAIS has the most experiences in organizing sport events for visually impaired people. Later on, a training course will be held in Romania, our responsibility will mainly consist of recruiting those participants who can benefit the most from this training course and to organize their travel.
The third “work package” of this project is the “Intellectual Output” which, in this case will be a Guide book consisting of informative chapters about organizing inclusive sport events for visually impaired people.
We are already working on writing the chapters, the Guide book will be published in September and an audio version of it will be launched in October, stay tuned for that, as well. 😉
The fourth part of the project activities are the dissemination where the aims are twofold:
First, to disseminate to the general public about the project, to promote the Erasmus+ Sport programme and to provide proof for the funders that we actually implement the activities the way we had promised.
And second to reach the target group of our activities, to spread the news as widely as possible, but also by concentrating on our target group to be able to recruit those participants for whom the content of the programmes are most relevant and beneficial. Here the target group also consists of those who yet don’t organize such inclusive activities, but could get motivated to do that with a bit of inspiration and guide.
Can you tell me more about your previous projects as well?
Besides my work in BAIS, currently I also work for another NGO, called Subjective Values Foundation where I am managing different projects in the topic of anti-radicalisation (through sports and through social work and online campaigns), supporting hate-crime victims in the health care system, and supporting migrants to be able to legally find employment or to start their own businesses in Hungary. Besides, there is a new association I’m directing called KacsaKő Association which we havsportse just founded this year with a group of friends, and where we organise socially inclusive sport programmes for children coming from diverse social bubbles. KacsaKő actually closely collaborate with BAIS, for example, this year two of the camp counsellors were coming from the members of BAIS. (High fives to Rodrigo and Gábor!) This is also something great about BAIS: depending on your field of interest and focus you will always find many connection points with the association.
What are your future goals?
At the moment I am in a very exciting part of my life, as I just got accepted to the Doctoral School of Psychology at ELTE, where I plan to continue to work on my passion namely on how to reduce prejudices with the tool of sport – focusing on PE classes and after school recreational sport activities of the youth. I’m looking forward to learning and experimenting more on this topic, and to transfer the experiences I gained at my work in my studies, and also to use the knowledge I’ll learn during my studies in the implementation of future projects.
Find out more about the project: http://sportsense.scoutsociety.ro/hu/?fbclid=IwAR3CxR2vjlR-YFWeicoF5cfQzFIoBAHcUTfFjm1BX5K8yktVLjX3FwuVdYM
Budapest, 2021. 08. 09.
Meet the author:
Dorottya Rekecki
"I truly believe that sport has the power to make changes in terms of social inclusion. At BAIS, we are using this beloved tool for that within our projects and events, and I am so grateful for being part of this community where you can learn a lot."