Location and general information
Access to Sport - 
Employability - 
Gender Equality - 
Healthy lifestyle - 
Infrastructure and equipment - 
Personal developmentContext
Belgium has a strong football culture, yet participation remains highly unequal. Girls are still significantly underrepresented in football as in other areas, and the gap is even wider in urban, culturally diverse and lower-income areas.
In places like Leuven, a rapidly growing and highly diverse university town, many girls face persistent social, cultural, and practical barriers to accessing and staying in sport and other activities. While Leuven offers many sports opportunities, mainstream club structures often struggle to respond adequately to the realities of girls from migrant backgrounds and socially vulnerable families.
Limited financial means, mobility issues, gender stereotypes, and a lack of safe, welcoming spaces where girls can truly feel at home, be themselves, and belong limit participation and increase dropouts, especially when sport is organised along linear pathways that reward performance over belonging.
There is a growing need for socially driven sports initiatives that not only offer access but also foster social mixing, ownership, empowerment, and long-term engagement. Football Girls Leuven emerged within this context, responding to a strong local need for a safe, inclusive, girls-only football space rooted in the neighbourhood and everyday public space. The club has grown rapidly, reaching more than 240 girls, demonstrating both the demand for such an approach and the limits of a purely volunteer-driven structure.
Project goals
With Play It Forward, Football Girls Leuven seeks to strengthen the club and continue to break down structural barriers to football participation for girls in Leuven by means of a sustainable, girl-led model that combines sport, youth work, and social inclusion. The project is designed to ensure that girls from diverse backgrounds and in potentially vulnerable situations can not only access football but also stay engaged, develop ownership, and have a voice beyond the club, transforming the club and football into a sustainable tool for inclusion, empowerment, and structural change for girls in Leuven.
Specific project goals
- Build a coherent, club-wide structure that connects access, anchored participation, ownership, and policy impact in a clear, circular pathway, through which girls can enter, engage, pause, and re-engage on their own terms
- Increase access and reduce dropout rates by embedding support, accessibility, and inclusive practices into the club’s day-to-day operations
- Strengthen girls’ ownership by integrating leadership, volunteering, and co-creation into club life
- Professionalise coordination, monitoring, and partnerships to ensure continuity, quality, and long-term impact beyond the project period
- Translate local practice into broader impact by sharing knowledge and influencing policy on inclusive, girl-friendly sport
Project content
Play It Forward comprises four pillars:
- Pillar 1 – Access: Bringing football to girls in their daily environment through regular street football sessions, school partnerships and neighbourhood activities. These low-threshold initiatives are directly linked to the club through a buddy support system that ensures smooth, stigma-free entry into regular training. Public space activations make football and playgrounds more inclusive and girl-friendly.
- Pillar 2 – Anchored participation: Embedding support structures within the club to help girls stay engaged over time and prevent dropouts, including a strengthened buddy system, accessible membership policies, mobility support (bicycle loan scheme and carpools) and a more permanent menstruation programme. A shared framework guides trainers and volunteers in creating safe, inclusive team environments.
- Pillar 3 – Ownership: Creating structured pathways for girls to take on roles as volunteers, coaches or referees, supported by training, mentoring and leadership workshops. Co-creation and shared leadership are embedded in the teams and club life, strengthening girls’ ownership and voice.
- Pillar 4 – Policy impact: Systematising impact monitoring, sharing good practices through local and national networks, and actively involving girls in advocacy around sport, youth work and public spaces.
To implement the pillars and pave a sustainable pathway, the project requires a dedicated professional project coordinator (working at 70% of a full-time position), whose role is to connect and coordinate the four pillars, build partnerships with schools and youth organisations, develop mobility and inclusion measures, and ensure monitoring, evaluation and long-term anchoring of the model within the club and beyond.
Partner
