New Years Greetings

Dear all,
First of all Happy New year to all of you. Thank you for the good and beneficial year passed.
Some of the major milestones we all produced together in 2012 was:

  • Open Fun Football Schools and Fun Festivals for over 115,000 boys and girls !
  • The Open Fun Football Schools have started Cross Sector Cooperation between sport + school + police in partnership with SSP-Sekretariatet in Copenhagen.
  • The very first Open Fun Football School for boys and girls was organized in Afghanistan
  • A Sport´s Leaders Academy for Bhutan was launched in partnership with the Danish Olympic Committee
  • 25,000 high school students in Denmark devoted a full-day work to raise funds for our up-coming Youth Leader program for Iraq in partnership with Operation Dagsværk
  • Cross Cultures and UEFA have signed a FSR core partnership agreement for the Open Fun Football Schools in Europe until end 2017.
  • Cross Cultures is in process of negotiating an agreement with Foundation FC Barcelona for the implementation of a FutbolNet program in Qatar, Oman and Iraq.

We have of course made more achievements. Each of you has very good stories to tell. So again thank you all for your partnership, friendship and colleagueship.
At the beginning of a new year, it is always time to evaluate the past years achievements and set up goals or paths for the new-year to come. With this little letter I would like to share with all of you my thoughts/consideration New Years evening 2013:
Open Fun Football Schools has proved very successful. We use the Open Fun Football Schools to approach post conflict areas, and with our fun football activities we tell the story of “Peace, Love & Understanding” – in real time so to speak.
However, to keep up the spirit of our unique organization we need constantly to challenge ourselves – to develop and grow. One way of doing so is to expand our operation and seek new friends and partners in new countries around the world. Another way is to develop our approaches.
Two years ago, we made a new strategy for Cross Cultures. We wanted to focus our work on three areas:
A)  In the “old countries”: we would like to develop our OFFS Plus approach – giving special attention to the crime prevention: school + sport + police
B)  In the Mid East: we would like to give special attention to youth
C)  We love to organize Open Fun Football Schools for boys and girls with new friends in Afghanistan.
The achievements 2012 confirms to me that we have started a good work on all three dimensions. Of course there is still a lot to do to succeed, but we have developed a realistic path and with dedication and hard work I am convinced it is up to us to make it come through. No doubt that we will continue our work and developments on all the above dimensions.
Again in 2012, I visited several Open Fun Football Schools in several countries, and I must admit that I am always finding myself admiring the local coaches for their commitment and their way of playing with the children. E.g. In October I among others visited an Open Fun Football Schools in Sarajevo, which was organized as a showcase at a UEFA CSR-Workshop with participants from all the 53 member countries. End of November our colleagues in Macedonia made another showcase for the Foundation FC Barcelona in Skopje. Both events confirmed to me that if I was a child, I couldn’t find any better way to be introduced to our game.
To put it differently, from a football point of view, the Open Fun Football School program is to me extremely strong “in the bottom of the pyramid”.  We are maybe the strongest “beginner concept” in football I have met so far. Correspondingly, should the Open Fun Football Schools also be considered a football development project the Open Fun Football Schools is to me “a gateway to football”. FA Moldova is to me a good example. In Moldova children and coaches enter the gate to football together through the Open Fun Football School program. Thus, the FA has made strategies on how they use the Open Fun Football Schools as tool to enroll more and new coaches in the FA curriculum. As a gate to develop girls football. As a gate to promote the game. As a gate to develop football for children with disabilities. As a gate to develop community football clubs. As a gate to provide crime prevention etc.
In other words: I suggest that we dedicate 2013 to further develop the Open Fun Football School program with the purpose to use the Open Fun Football School as tool to develop the best possible gateway to football.
Consequently I would like to invite you all to explore this vision together with me. If we want the Open Fun Football Schools to serve as the best possible gateway to football, we need of course to ask us selves and our partners: What is the best possible gateway to football you can imagine? What dimensions must be included? The fun element – sure; The socializing – sure; The good coach – sure; The child in the Centre – sure; The platform in local community – sure etc. etc.
But there is also another thing I am sure of: No one, I repeat NO ONE in the entire world, has the patent or the exclusiveness to the best gateway to football – neither Cross Cultures nor FC Barcelona. The true experts are to my opinion the coaches that are working with the kids on a day-to-day basis. The ones that dedicate themselves and give their time and commitment to create the best possible environment for their kids in their specific cultural context.
In other words: In Cross Cultures we can never facilitate a gateway to football alone. We can only facilitate activities and a framework – a social platform – for our thousands of dedicated coaches that provide them the opportunity to meet with colleagues and friends to get inspiration and new impulses and share views and perceptions on what they consider the best possible gateway to grassroots football for our children.
I sincerely hope that we will all meet in 2013 with the intention to develop together the best possible gateway to grassroots football.
Happy New year to all
Yours in Fun Football
Anders Levinsen