An Atmosphere of Collective Learning
Eve Wilcox is the Communications and Program Manager at Creating Chances. She is a Facilitator Leader, whose responsibilities include team training, and managing the region of Armadale, whilst also handling a lot of communications and content.
At Festival19, during the Women's World Cup in Lyon, France, Eve was the representative of Oceania, and part of Asia too. Eve arrived a week before the first cohort of participants to create the training that she would then deliver to the next incoming cohort. During 2019, the theme for the Festival was Gender Equity so the training Eve facilitated focused directly on that. One activity included a post-match discussion to determine if those values were maintained in the game.
Eve remembers these reflections as an insightful moment in her Festival19 experience as the participants had to “see if they actually upheld all the rules they were talking about, and what those rules mean for their further communities and societies. So it could be a rule like, you have to pass girl-boy-girl-boy, because often we don’t pass the ball to someone in our communities, to someone who doesn't have access to it.” The work Eve did with her co-workers from the global ‘Sport for Good’ community was an impactful experience for her.
She remembers, “the six or seven absolutely incredibly inspiring women from around the world who had faced a myriad of obstacles who were working in ‘Sport for Good’ to most benefit their communities was the thing” that Eve found to have a great impact on her.
“That was where it was [like] “ok, we feel pretty silent and separate in our communities'', but that was where we had these women share ideas and be really open to knowledge sharing and listening to each other, and creating a festival that included the cultural considerations of everyone around the globe, and using those as a strong point.”
The “atmosphere of collective learning and openness that football” brought to her time in Lyon is fondly recollected by Eve to this day.
During time spent backpacking in Central America, Eve saw the perfect culmination of her passions for travel, bringing positive change to the world, and sport, in the ‘Sport for Good’ sector and so her time at Creating Chances began, once back on Australian soil. Eve grounds every day with her intention of being “a hard-working positive force for good”.
She brings this attitude into her work with Creating Chances and hopes to inspire young people to do the same.
“I’m very passionate about opening up doors, and training pathways for other people to reach their potential, so creating more programs where young people are able to access the best parts of themselves, and then use that in whatever field they choose in the future, to then be other positive hard working forces for good.”
Looking forward, Eve would like to see more equitable access to programs like Creating Chances and Festival23 for young people across Australia and then young people across the globe.