CEV leadership joins meeting with EU Commissioner and FIVB to empower young people through Volleyball

CEV President Roko Sikirić and CEV Managing Director Vuk Karanović joined a meeting organised on Tuesday at the Volleyball House in Lausanne, Switzerland with the European Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport, Glenn Micallef. FIVB President Fabio Azevedo welcomed the EU delegation to Lausanne together with FIVB General Sports Director Steve Tutton and heads of relevant FIVB departments for a round of discussions on opportunities to strengthen collaboration and develop further synergy.

From the perspective of the European Volleyball Confederation, the ambition is to join forces with Commissioner Micallef and his team by taking lessons from the experiences stemming from a variety of grassroots initiatives already run by the CEV to support the wider Volleyball community and harness the power of Volleyball to bring people together, inspire young generations and create opportunities through sport. 

The CEV is currently running a variety of such programmes funded by the European Union through their Erasmus+ fund, such as the CEV School Project ‘Play Volleyball – Grow with it’ that involves as many as 30 National Federations, or the EmpowHER Volleyball Game Changer (EVGC) designed to support female leadership in the sport. The parties discussed ways to align the actions and goals of such programmes with the FIVB Empowerment Programme – thereby laying the foundations for a sustainable, long-term and coordinated growth of the game at the grassroots level, while spreading the positive values associated with Volleyball, as the FIVB works towards its goal of connecting as many as 1.6 billion people to Volleyball by 2032.

Commissioner Micallef was joined in Lausanne by his Head of Cabinet, Clint Tanti, and Deputy Head of Cabinet, Agata Dziarnowska, alongside Giorgio Guazzugli Marini, Head of the Sport Unit at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (DG EAC), and Matteo Zacchetti, Senior Officer in the Sport Unit.