4 Creating and sustaining an ARC environment

For anti-racist coaching practice to be sustained, it requires much more than one individual coach to adopt it.

Creating and sustaining an ARC environment involves ensuring that anti-racist practice and considerations are embedded in all aspects of an organisation providing youth sport activities.

Things to consider to help build and then sustain an ARC environment include the following:

• Review and amend policies, procedures and practices to ensure anti-racist principles of valuing diversity and seeking to eliminate racial discrimination is at the heart of the club.
• Create and display a policy for dealing with incidents of racial abuse and discrimination – both from within the club/staff itself and from external sources (i.e. opposition players or support staff).
• Make anti-racism a core component of the club itself – promote and advertise the club’s position and provide examples of the types of activities that take place to ensure ARC is being embedded at the club.
• Ensure that all club members and stakeholders are aware of the ARC principles and understand the organisation’s commitment to it, and their responsibility to embed it in their own practice and regularly endorse it in their interactions with others.

Changes such as these go well beyond one individual and are likely to require significant buy-in from organisational leaders. It represents the stage of furthest development of embedding anti-racism in youth sport and should be viewed as a strategic goal to work towards once ARC practice has been embedded across a critical mass of employees or volunteers within the same organisation.

Having now explored in some detail the ARC model of practice, the next section encourages you to take a moment to reflect on your learning across this course and consider what you can start doing to incorporate the ARC model into your own practice.