Summer profiles: using sport to unite refugees and host communities

Antoine Tardy / FLAG21

In the fourth episode of our summer profile series on Inside Geneva, we talk to a Geneva career woman and a Geneva asylum-seeker about a project to unite communities through sport. Surely the world’s humanitarian capital is good at welcoming refugees and immigrants?

“We have all these international organisations working on various global challenges. But when you talk to people from Geneva, they don’t really know what’s happening in this bubble,” says Lena Menge, from the Geneva Graduate Institute and co-founder of Flag 21.

For asylum-seekers, arriving in a new country, even a safe one, can be hard.

“I was very lonely. It wasn’t easy. You feel lost and don’t really know what’s happening or where you are. It takes time to realise where you are and what you are supposed to do,” says Mahdie Alinejad, an asylum-seeker from Iran and a coach with Flag 21.

Flag 21 is a project that brings locals and asylum-seekers together – to run, swim, do yoga, and much more.

“Sport was actually a meaningful tool to include people in need, people that needed a community around them as well,” continues Menge.

The project benefits everyone.

“It’s not easy to have this confidence and grow in society as an immigrant. So this is a very good thing that they’re doing, giving opportunities to people who really need it, to find themselves, their space, their place and their confidence,” says Alinejad.

“They have such resilience and so much strength to share that you come away thinking ‘my God, my little problems are really nothing’,” concludes Menge.

Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva to listen to the full interview.

Find out more about the Inside Geneva podcast and our other Swiss podcasts in English here.

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