Karin Blankenstein: LGBTIQ+ awareness and inclusivity in sports
We spoke to Karin Blankenstein from the John Blankenstein Foundation (JBF) during Pride month.
Karin co-founded JBF in 2008, shortly after her brother John Blankenstein passed away. John was an openly gay Dutch football referee. Both Karin and John are recipients of the Bob Angelo Medal from COC Netherlands.
This is a follow up to an article on NL Platform; LGBTIQ+ and sports: encouraging you to 'be exactly who you are'
Here's what Karin had to say!
Hi Karin, could you please tell us what the John Blankenstein Foundation (JBF) is? To let readers who have not read our previous article know what you stand for.
The John Blankenstein Foundation is a volunteer based organisation. We have around 19 people who are mostly current or retired sports persons. Our most important ambition and the main work we do is talking about how to create a safe environment for LGBTIQ+ people in sports.
We do this with workshops and talks at sports clubs, but we have also been seeing a lot of interest from sports education programmes as well in regards with this topic.
How does Pride month factor in with awareness for safe spaces for LGBTIQ+ individuals in sports and perhaps beyond? Is it important for inclusivity?
It helps people who are not focused on this topic in general realise its importance. They sit up and think...‘Hey, I wasn’t aware of certain issues and maybe I should pay more attention to them.’ You see pride walks across cities in the Netherlands and this in combination with making people aware of the LGBTIQ+ involvement in sports is really important.
We often hear that people are unaware that they have members of the community in their sports clubs. It's surprising because sports clubs with 500+ members sometimes think that they have no one who is LGBTIQ+ as members. How is that possible? They surely exist.
Without talking about this subject it's not possible to make people aware about creating inclusive environments for LGBTIQ+ people in sports and beyond. Pride month helps with this goal. It allows people to bring up the subject, have the conversation, and celebrate their teammates who are LGBTIQ+.
You also conduct workshops on ethics. So apart from awareness, can you tell us more about the workshops that deal with ethics?
Our workshops are all about having conversations. We have two people conducting the workshop out of which one leads and one provides a personal account to inspire people. We begin by asking participants if they know anyone who is LGBTIQ+ at their sports club and if they’ve considered how they act towards them.
Very often the response is denial of having LGBTIQ+ members. They follow up by asking why it’s important to talk about this when they are just here to play sports. Our answer to that is filling them in with a personal story from our workshop coordinator. They quickly realise why it's important for someone to be able to express that they are LGBTIQ+ in order to feel safe and accepted.
It’s a sort of breakthrough moment for some where they understand that it's not just about the sport, but about community and inclusivity in general. Those things are deeply tied in with any sport. The goal is to help young people learn that acceptance involves not having to hide or lie about your identity. They also are made aware that abusive slurs towards LGBTIQ+ people based on stereotypes are not ok.
We never go in to lecture people and it's ok if people have made mistakes in the past which they now realise are mistakes. It's important to learn how to change and grow with new knowledge. That’s some of the basis of our workshop on ethics.
What would you say to sports people, companies, or public institutions who want to be better allies to the LGBTIQ+ community? How do they celebrate rather than just accept?
Talk about it and be open to change! It begins there. The answer is not easy and there isn’t one answer either. However, everything begins with a conversation and willingness to learn. We are volunteer based and receive support from the Netherlands, but of course we are willing to go wider with our message. We are always open to connect with companies and institutions who would like to begin this conversation with us and their employees or members.
We recently conducted a workshop with Stedin which went great. It's important to think about this topic in sports, but inclusivity is also a topic for companies. They reached out to us saying that their company is also a team with team members and so they felt it's important to talk about this. You have to know each other well as team members and trust each other to do good work. Feeling safe and accepted is just as important to companies as it is to sports. It also sets a good example and I believe creates the kind of work environment that people want to be a part of.
We can only do it together. So let's start by reaching out to each other to solve this challenge.
SportsNL has the mission to harness the power of sport for international trade, diplomacy, knowledge and innovation exchange, and social programmes. How does a programme like this help you?
We would like to connect with more companies as I mentioned before. What we talk about is often a subject that many don’t prioritise when planning company workshops. I think that this should change and I’m hoping more companies see the value in this subject.
More and more young people deciding where they would like to work are invested in this topic. They care about diversity and they care about inclusivity. So, beyond the sports field and in regards with the sports industry at large I think that companies can benefit greatly from our involvement. If they want to remain relevant with future talent they need to start having conversations about the LGBTIQ+ community and about inclusivity.
We have worked with some companies but connecting with the wider ecosystem of sports companies in the Netherlands will be great. SportsNL can help us connect and help each other stand for inclusivity and LGBTIQ+ awareness. Anyone interested can always reach out to us via the John Blankenstein Foundation website. We will get back to you almost immediately.