Why we need to pay attention to play, sport, and human rights

Play and sport, like arts and culture, are an essential part of what makes us who we are. They are central to our lives, and accessing them is a basic human right.

We sat down with Ige Egal, CEO and founder of Play for Dignity and a Maytree fellow, to talk about why our sector should pay attention to play and sport, how our sport systems might be prioritizing the wrong things, and the kind of leadership we need to make a lasting difference.

Bonnie Mah, Maytree: Why should we pay attention to sport, recreation, play, and physical activity?

Ige Egal, Play for Dignity: Play and recreation are integral to human development. It’s how we relate to one another. It’s how we learn social skills and how to confront challenges. That’s the essence of it – it’s skill building and learning how to socialize.

It’s a great way to ensure social cohesion. Sport and play provide opportunities for social interaction and for fostering a sense of community spirit. When you think about local or national sports teams, there’s community spirit in cheering for a common team, for example.

It’s also a great tool for youth development because it promotes physical, emotional, and social development. This can help with increasing educational attainment for folks that might be having challenges at school, and access to employment for those that might be experiencing barriers.

We can also look at physical and mental health benefits. Physical activity, play, and sport have been shown to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress; it’s a natural way to help mental well-being.

There’s a whole host of reasons why we should be paying attention to sport. It can be a powerful tool for building a vibrant community, if we build systems around it that take advantage of these benefits, if we are intentional about it, and if we are proactive about it.

Bonnie: When we talk about those benefits for individuals and for communities, are we talking about human rights or are we talking about nice-to-haves?

Ige: We are talking about human rights.

The thing about human rights is that when your rights are secure, you don’t often think about them. That’s why discussions around rights can sometimes be framed as “nice-to-haves.” When people say that these things that are essential to a dignified life are “luxuries,” it’s dismissive. It’s unconscious privilege.

All the benefits of sport that we’ve discussed have been recognized as necessities for individuals to live a dignified life. Sport can be a tool to enable those benefits for all. There are international legal frameworks and declarations that recognize this, and Canada has signed on to these.

Once we recognize that sport, play, physical activity are rights, we have to make this a reality by building systems that enable participation, accountability, non-discrimination, and empowerment. Otherwise, the benefits of sport only accrue to the people who can afford to purchase them.

Bonnie: What you’re saying reminds me a lot of a conversation I had with Annie Kidder from People for Education a few years ago. She talked about looking at education as a public rather than a private good, and its role in developing capable human beings.

Ige: We should absolutely view sport, play, and physical activity as public goods. Sport enhances individual and community health and wellbeing. So, in the same way that education is about developing capable human beings, sport, play, and physical activity are about developing healthy human beings. Capable and healthy human beings are happier human beings. That alone should be enough to invest in these tools.

Too often, we focus on the outcome of sports: the pride or prize. Who won? We don’t put the same energy and resources into the process: engagement, participation, and the intrinsic value of sport, play, and physical activity. This sometimes leads to the commodification of sport: we privatize what should be a public good. As a result, our public infrastructure – parks, municipal recreational facilities, and even athletic facilities inside public schools – become driven by a profit motive.

Taking a rights-based approach helps us focus on the public good. It means that communities can and should have means to determine what sport opportunities they have. It means that when something goes wrong there is a framework for accountability and remedy. It means that no one is discriminated against and we build equity into our sport and physical activity system. It means that we have ways to, and know how to, claim our rights.

We need to ensure everybody can realize their basic human right to access sport. We need to ensure that there’s sufficient physical and social infrastructure for that. We need to ensure that our assets, whether it’s school facilities or municipal recreational facilities, respond to community needs and ensure basic access, rather than being seen as a moneymaking tool to fill a budget deficit. It means governments need to appropriately fund sport, physical activity, and play.

Bonnie: Our public systems influence the way that we experience sport. How did we end up here? How is it that our systems behave or have been designed this way?

Ige: We ended up here because we’re not putting a lot of value on sport, play, and physical activity, so part of our challenge will be to address that question.

Is the problem that we don’t have enough funding? A more interesting question is how we look at the assets we have and funding that we already spend and consider spending it more effectively. For instance, could we think long term about making sure that everybody adopts a healthy lifestyle? Given that we have a public healthcare system, could we prioritize and allocate more funding on prevention over time, so there is less strain on our healthcare system in the long run? Sport, play, and physical activity need to be better integrated into our social policy to ensure that it is prioritized as a tool and appropriately resourced. We must connect the dots across our different systems for better integration.

Our federal government organizes sport from the department of Heritage Canada, which tells you that it sees it as a tool for celebrating Canada’s brand, rather than developing healthy Canadians. It should really be in health or in social and community development, because sport is more than winning a medal.

Part of the question is, how do we break down the silos and put the community and the individual at the centre?

Bonnie: If people and communities are not currently at the centre of our sport systems, what is? What is driving the sport systems that we have now?

Ige: If you read through Canada’s sport policy, on the face of it, it’s great. It talks a lot about some of the issues that we’ve discussed, and it tries to centre community and individuals. Where it fails is that it doesn’t provide a mechanism to implement those policies.

So it’s not really a problem of intent. The problem is a lack of coordinated, strategic action to achieve policy objectives. This is a root cause of many of the issues we face in our sport and physical activity systems.

A rights-based approach not only demands that there is meaningful participation for people and communities, but also that there are accountability mechanisms and sufficient information for people to make informed decisions and to be able to hold governments to account.

Bonnie: If there was one thing we could do to catalyze action, to start us down the path towards a system that supports and advances people’s human right to sport, where would you start?

Ige:  The thing that will have the most impact is instituting leadership in our policy implementation. That would force policymakers to back up their rhetoric with specific action.

If you have a policy document without a strategic implementation plan that has specific objectives, your policy document is just a dream. It’s never going to get implemented.

Currently, there’s no agency to lead implementation. There is no sufficient funding to support the objectives of the policy. If you look at Canada’s sport policy document, it doesn’t commit to actually doing anything. It is simply a document for direction. The provinces pick and choose what they want to implement.

In addition, we should ensure that our next sport policy – now two years overdue – is not only human rights informed but seeks human rights outcomes. That’s where I would start.

Bonnie: We’ve talked about how sport touches so many areas of our lives. For those of us in the sector working on other areas of economic and social rights, how should we think about how the human right to sport interacts with our work?

Ige: I think a good place to start is simply asking the question, how does my work help ensure people’s health and wellness? If the answer is, “It doesn’t!” then the follow-up question is, how could play, sport, and physical activity be part of our work so it addresses health and wellness? I think that’s where I would start.

In education, you can implement play as a learning method. Making sure that the school itself has the appropriate facilities for physical activity.

If you look at housing, the City of Toronto has put a value on arts in new development; each new development must have some sort of public art piece. What is the health and wellness requirement? Do we require each new building to have amenities that will improve the health and wellness of the community?

Play is the way we relate to one another; we learn by playing. When we play together, we feel a sense of cohesion and community. It’s intrinsic to who we are and how we relate to the world. When you think about your community, think about, how do they play? Do they play cricket, or football, or some other sport? Do they participate, do they watch it, do they share it? Play and sport is such a powerful opportunity to bring people together and help people feel like, “I belong here.”