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Mari Kooskora, Estonian Business School Katri-Liis Reimann, Tallinn University
SCULT SOCIAL ENTERPRISE CASE STUDY
Background Inactivity levels are growing and the number of sport volunteers is diminishing in Europe. Passive models and campaigns promoting physical activity and sports for all have their limits. Therefore, Europe needs and deserves innovative and radical, but simple, more authentic and engaging, scalable models to solve this growingly important complex challenge. World Sport Volunteers Movement SCULT has a creative solution. Sport is the most attractive field for volunteering, in which over 30 million adults plus young volunteers in the EU take part either occasionally or regularly. For example, the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympic games had about 70,000 sport volunteers nicknamed as Game Makers or Runners. However, the area of sport volunteering is relatively chaotic with many challenges – one of them being the fluctuating quality of voluntary work and information asymmetry between the sport event organizers/sport clubs and potential volunteers. These challenges are common across cities and countries and in the case of both local and big international sport events. As the sport industry relies heavily on volunteers (in Finland
199 out of 200 people related to sport clubs and events are volunteers) and their number differs from country to country at times, their activation would ultimately lead to more active and healthier societies in Europe and globally. The SCULT team is solving these social challenges by using best experiences from the start-up as well as the technology world.
Vision and Mission The vision of SCULT is to build lifelong physically active and community-oriented lifestyles and alleviate the social and economic burden of physical inactivity. Its mission is to facilitate the matchmaking and communication between volunteers and sport event organizers through business model innovation in the field of sport volunteering. The central element of the organization is an international sport volunteers movement it develops and related services like the matching solution for sport event organizers and volunteers.
