Brian Lewis, president of the T&T Olympic Committee (TTOC) says there needs to be a radical overhaul in the way national sporting organisations (NSOs) access funding for athlete and stakeholder development in this country. At present government was the main contributor to this process, he said, but as the State shifts it priorities to tackle issues related to the provision of proper health care, as well as improving public safety and national security, Lewis is convinced that NSOs needed to enter a new chapter in the way they conducted business. The reputation of the sport fraternity was tarnished during the last year, he said, because of public squabbles witnessed between the Sport Ministry and NSOs over how taxpayers’ funds should be accessed and released.
Citing these uncomfortable developments in the arena, said Lewis, the TTOC will seriously discuss the reintroduction of a sport marketing forum first held back in February 2010. Lewis was of the opinion that the Sport Ministry and its implementing arm, the Sport Company of T&T (SporTT) might not have been able to get from the Ministry of Finance funds applied for which would have negatively affected NSOs with heightened budgetary expectations. This he believed would be crucial in developing the business capacity that various NSOs lack and would help administrators understand some mechanics of business. Once this is achieved, said Lewis, NSOs could now design proposals to begin the process of showing corporate executives not only how their alignment to sport can bolster their corporate social responsibility efforts, but also improve their profit margins.
“I think it is absolutely necessary to help us build capacity and to help take a different approach to the whole question of funding sport. I don’t think that the reliance–and there is significant reliance on Government funds–is a healthy situation. Sport on the whole needs to diversify how it goes about funding and generating funds. As part of the whole sport marketing re-look we have to look at a number of different things,” he said. Lewis said, “We must be able to go to corporate T&T with a value added approach in terms of how sports can–besides the corporate social responsibility perspective–help corporate T&T meet their bottom line. I think we have to be realistic. Corporate T&T’s focus is their bottom line and there is nothing wrong with that. I don’t understand why people want to make corporate T&T (feel) guilty. Business is about profit and what we have to do within sports is review how we go about it. I genuinely and honestly feel so. We have to try to develop a parallel partnership in the sense of
what value does sport bring to corporate T&T, in addition to corporate social responsibility. How can we assist corporate T&T achieve their objectives?”
He said the state of the local economy could be a major factor, too, and the reality that in an economy that is not as buoyant the Ministry of Sport and SporTT were doing their best with the allocation available, but obviously there were difficult decisions to be made. And therefore, he said, the time was right for new strategies focusing on securing greater and more sustainable investments from the business sector should be rolled out.