The homeless are a group of people characterised by social exclusion, stigmatisation, discrimination, and they are prone to have issues in communicating with various establishments. They are often excluded from different spheres of public life; that is why regular and continuous activities are key to changing their lives. One of the productive activities, which fill an individual’s day and offer social support, could be sports. Through sports, people can connect with others, expand their social networks, and practice social norms. Sports also positively affect their physical and mental health. In numerous European countries, as well as in the United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, sports is used as a means of integrating the homeless, immigrants, high-risk drug addicts and other vulnerable persons. In Slovenia, researching homelessness is limited because there is no formal institution centrally charged with keeping records of homelessness. Due to this lack of research, which could study the effectiveness of sports programs and activities for the homeless, what I wanted to explore with my findings was what the homeless think of the sports activities. Furthermore, which of them to they participate in and which areas of their life do the activities have influence on. I intended to further explore the aforementioned area of research and use the findings to expand the possibility of using sports with handling vulnerable social groups. I have conducted interviews with ten homeless persons who participate in sports activities under the patronage of Kralji Ulice society, and with three professional workers who lead or have lead the activity in the aforementioned society. Despite the small sample, the results showed that sports positively affect the life of those homeless people, who are included in sports activities for a longer period of time. They believe that the inclusion in sports helped them to expand their social networks, improve their health and the way they confront issues in their life. Professional workers are of the opinion that sports are one of the best integration tools and that it played a crucial role with achieving change in their lives for those homeless who formed the first team of Kralji Ulice. On the basis of these results we can plan for sports to be more recognized and used as an effective means for social integration of the homeless, and other target vulnerable groups of people could be included in further research.
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