Sports and physical activity can contribute to health, social connection, talent development, and equal opportunities. Yet in practice, it turns out that a sports facility alone is rarely enough to bring about lasting change.

In many disadvantaged neighborhoods, young people grow up with fewer opportunities for education and employment. Their talents are not always recognized or harnessed, even though sports fields are precisely where important skills — such as teamwork, taking responsibility, and leadership — are developed. Without proper guidance and connections to education, employment, and other community organizations, however, these talents often remain hidden. That is why SPORTIVE is exploring how sports, technology, and guidance can work together to help create a brighter future for young people.

From Sports Venue to Ecosystem

One of SPORTIVE’s central locations is the Paper Dome in Amsterdam Zuidoost, a sports-focused hub where young people, residents, entrepreneurs, researchers, and social partners collaborate on new solutions. Young people are not merely participants in this process; they play an active role in developing, testing, and improving innovations.

By connecting sports practice with design-based research, we can better explore how sports contribute to addressing societal challenges.

The field lab builds on a design-oriented approach in which experimentation, research, and learning go hand in hand. The insights generated here are immediately tested in practice and continuously refined. As Jan-Willem van der Roest, lecturer at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, notes: 'It is valuable that CLICKNL provides a platform for this public-private partnership. By connecting sports practice with design-oriented research, we can better investigate how sports contribute to addressing societal challenges. This project helps us not only to describe that impact convincingly, but also to make it more carefully measured, visible, open to discussion, and manageable.'

SPORTIVE builds on the 3X3 Unites approach. For example, work is underway on the 3X3 Leader Course and the 3X3 Unites Academy — a community app designed to connect young people and monitor their development — as well as sustainable playgrounds that are being designed and tested in collaboration with various partners. Throughout the project, the team will examine which innovations actually contribute to societal impact and how successful approaches can be applied more widely.

Making talent visible

An important part of SPORTIVE is making young people's development visible. Within the fieldlab, work is being done on a Skills Passport and digital dashboards that can be used to better track skills, growth and societal impact. As project leader Kees Lohman (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) explains: ‘With this fieldlab, we are taking an important step towards a system in which the societal earning capacity of young talent becomes more visible and manageable. Through tools including a Skills Passport and digital dashboards, we are exploring how the development of young people in vulnerable neighbourhoods can be tracked, valued and linked to broader social and economic benefits. In this way, we aim to better demonstrate that investing in young talent is not only the right thing to do, but also the best choice from a socio-economic perspective.’

We are taking an important step towards a system in which the social earning capacity of young talent becomes more visible and manageable.

From Paper Dome to other cities

The ultimate goal of SPORTIVE is to ensure that successful approaches are not limited to Amsterdam Zuidoost. The knowledge, methods and innovations developed within the field lab should also be applicable in other locations. Open38 in Zwolle serves as the first case for this broader application. As an initiator and driving force behind SPORTIVE, Sportinnovator is involved in this wider application and works to ensure that knowledge and innovations from the project are also applied in other locations and in combination with other sports. As Jeroen Müller explains: 'At the end of this process, there won’t be a thick report sitting in a drawer, but a validated ‘Toolkit 1.0.’ This is a blueprint that we can immediately roll out in other Dutch cities. What works at the Paper Dome in Amsterdam and at Open38 in Zwolle should become the standard for every neighborhood-focused approach in the Netherlands.'

A total of €576,046 in PPP subsidies will be allocated.