With the publication of Practical Guide to Social Sporting Work #1: 125 Protagonists on Visions, Needs and Dreams, in 2021, we immediately introduced a new term: social sporting work. We emphasized that we ourselves had no normative, formalizing or institutionalizing intention with that term and pointed above all to the symbolic importance of the hyphen between social and sporting. We wanted to link territories and build bridges, both between policy domains and between the various related labels (such as Neighborhood Sport, Sport+, +Sport, Social Sport Initiatives, etc.). The protagonists further propagated the new term themselves in the field, also playing linguistically with “work”: social-sport operation, social-sport network, social-sport works!

The question of how impact can be made even more visible (often also with a view to making temporary project funding sustainable), ran like a thread through the 125 testimonies in #1. Therefore, in this second volume we present a wide range of in-depth insights related to evaluating impact. With a nod to the financial sector, the color of this second volume is dark green. After all, that is the color of the top label when it comes to sustainable impact. Ideally, the insights in this volume will lead to the “impact investments” needed to make the warm orange-red glow of the social-sports protagonists dark green sustainable so that the world ultimately becomes one big post-neoliberal “blue zone.