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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

United By Sport strives to leverage the transformational power of sport to promote equality and fight hate and discrimination which can come in all its forms, spanning various grounds such as religion or belief, racial or ethnic origin, gender, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation and more. The United by Sport program has been created to provide support to organizations that fight such hate and discrimination through sport or in the sport sector.

TIMELINE & OUTLOOK

Application Period:
March 18th 2024 - May 31st 2024 
Evaluation Period General Programming:
July 1st 2024 - October 31st 2024 
Evaluation Period Project Specific:
July 1st 2024 - November 29th 2024 

Please note that we are unable to provide status updates on pending applications.  

We are currently in the final stages of reviewing all proposals and will contact organizations if there are any outstanding questions.  

Information about selected projects will be publicly shared early next year once all selected partners have been onboarded to the program. 

ABOUT THE SELECTION PROCESS

We acknowledge the amount of effort and thought that went into the proposals submitted in response to the Request for Proposals by a wide range of organizations from around the world. In total, we received 754 applications from organizations in 107 countries, of which 347 were in the general program category and 407 in the project-specific category.  

We are grateful for the immense interest and trust that so many organizations have placed in us. We want to reciprocate this trust by making the selection process transparent. 

Eligibility Assessment 
The first step was to check whether the applicant met the basic admission criteria. Organizations that did not clearly meet all the necessary requirements were not considered further. If the eligibility of the organization could not be definitively determined based on the documents submitted, the organization was given the benefit of the doubt, and the application was forwarded for further evaluation. 

Two Rounds of Evaluation 
The proposals were evaluated in two rounds based on the evaluation criteria in the request for proposals. The first evaluation was carried out by an internal adidas Foundation team. Each promising application was then reviewed by a second evaluation team consisting of adidas Foundation staff or external experts. It was ensured that each application was evaluated by two different people. All eligibility and evaluation criteria can be found in the United by Sport RFP Guidelines which were posted to our website prior to the application process opening. Already at that stage, we might request more information about the organization and/or the individuals legally responsible for the organization to continue the review process. 

Evaluation Committee 
The proposals that scored highest on our evaluation criteria after the first and second reviews were sent to the final evaluation committee, made up of the adidas Foundation leadership team, for further review and decision-making. 

Final Vetting 
Proposals that pass these selection stages and receive the highest scores will be subject to a due diligence process, which consists of general compliance checks and verification of the accuracy of all documentation submitted. Final approval will only be given after this process is successfully completed.