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The Unity Cup Festival

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13th July 2005

One of my favourite contributors to the site, Ian Beesley, is involved with an initiative for integrating refugees and asylum seekers, called The Unity Cup, which takes place this weekend, July 16th and July 17th at Roundhay School in Leeds.

This is a festival of fun events and creative activities organised around a football tournament. Teams of asylum seekers and other displaced people will come from around the UK to compete for the Unity Cup.

Considering the news (relating to the London bombings of 7/7) emerging yesterday and today, ironically from the Leeds area,
we need Unity more than ever.

Quote from Adrian Jones, Co-ordinator, Your Story FC (last years winning team) :
“The Unity Cup Festival represents exactly what Your Story FC aims to achieve; enabling diverse teams to interact and share common experiences. Football can reach out to all communities – it crosses all language and cultural barriers.”

The Unity Cup Festival is a partnership project between Kick It Out & Heads Together Productions.
It receives financial support from, among others – the PFA.

The following poem inspired after reading the details available at :
http://www.elfm.co.uk/ then click on the link that says “DOWNLOAD THE INFORMATION HERE”

Your story. Our story.

Yours is filled with fear, atrocities, displacement.
Memories that are burned with terror, entwined
With the rotting flesh left behind.

Ours is one of comfort and plenty.
Of decency and democracy, sanctuary and frivolity
A mecca, for pursuants of equality.

Hard to imagine a common thread.
But football has squeezed itself
through the eye of a needle.

The Unity Cup is like a thimble.
A welcome mechanism to facilitate
integration, to spread the word

With a shared joy, to mix, to exchange
To farm the minds
To sow together

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Source: http://footballpoets.org/news/2005/07/13/the-unity-cup-festival/