Our activities
Our work focuses on designing high-quality sport-based activities that create opportunities for everyone involved.
Our work focuses on designing high-quality sport-based activities that create opportunities for connection, learning, confidence-building, and leadership.
We combine football festivals, community events, non-formal education workshops, and capacity-building programmes with long-term engagement, support, and local ownership. What begins as a simple sports activity often becomes the first safe step toward trust and dialogue.
An important part of our mission is empowering girls and women in sport. Through inclusive spaces, mentorship, and supportive environments, we help girls discover confidence and belonging in football, a space that often excludes them. Over the years, our work has contributed to the creation of new girls' football teams in Bosnia and Herzegovina and has supported young women in becoming coaches, volunteers, youth leaders, and visible role models. For us, gender equality is not an optional value. It is a core principle embedded in every activity.
Many of our flagship activities such as the Girls' Football Festival, the Mini-Van Tour, and community-based football sessions are now recognised formats that bring children together regardless of where they live, who they are, or how they identify. These activities are playful and welcoming yet deeply intentional. They are designed to open public spaces to everyone, challenge exclusion, and normalise diversity.
We work closely with sports schools, grassroots football clubs, youth centres, municipalities, civil society organisations, and community groups. With them, we build programmes that respond to local realities and can continue after a project ends. Training for facilitators, coaches, and youth leaders ensures that knowledge and practice remain within the community.
IZI continues to grow not only in scale but in purpose. What started as activism has become a long-term commitment to strengthening cross-community relationships and creating spaces where every person feels seen, included, and respected.
Programmes
Education, trainings & capacity building
Trainings for coaches, trainers and facilitators (ToT) & Workshops for children and youth.
Community Sport Programmes & Festivals
Mini Van Tour, Girls' Football Festival, and 3x3 Streetball Camp.
Youth participation & local actions
Startup Pool, Youth panels, peer learning, study visits, and local initiatives.
Dialogue, networking & cooperation
Roundtables and Conferences for local and regional actors.
Our Approach
We use football as a practical tool for inclusion, learning and connection.
Our programmes combine grassroots football, non-formal education, community outreach and regional exchange, with a strong focus on children and young people who have fewer opportunities to participate.
Football with a purpose
Football is our entry point. Through play, workshops and shared activities, we work on fair play, equality, teamwork, confidence, respect and understanding across differences.
Go where access is limited
We do not wait for participants to come to us. Through mobile programmes, community events and partnerships with local organisations, we bring activities to smaller, remote, divided and underserved communities.
Create real contact
We design activities that bring together children and young people who may otherwise have few opportunities to meet. Mixed teams, shared challenges, festivals and exchanges create space for cooperation rather than competition between groups.
Build local capacity
We train coaches, youth workers, volunteers and other local multipliers and involve clubs, schools, municipalities, football associations and civil society organisations in delivery. The aim is to strengthen people and structures that remain active locally.
Connect local work to a wider network
Local activities are linked through festivals, campaigns, regional exchanges, training and joint initiatives. This allows ideas, experience and relationships built in one community to travel much further.
Keep inclusion and safety at the centre
Gender equality, non-discrimination and safeguarding are built into programme design from the start. We actively work to create safe and meaningful participation for girls, Roma children, refugees and displaced young people, children with disabilities and others who face barriers to organised sport.