Hesse Runs Its Entire Migrant Sports-Integration Program From an Office in Frankfurt, Most Local Families Still Miss It

The Official Rule

If you’re a migrant or refugee family in Frankfurt and someone has told you to “just join a Verein,” that advice skips over something worth knowing: the office that runs Germany’s federal migrant sports-integration program for the entire state of Hesse is headquartered right here in the city, and most families never hear about it.

“Integration durch Sport” (IdS) is a real, long-running federal program, not a pilot or a one-off initiative. DOSB’s own program page confirms organized sport has run this program since 1989, coordinated by the Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund (DOSB) in close coordination with the Bundesministerium des Innern (BMI) and the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF). Nationwide, about 1,500 clubs are affiliated with the program, and roughly 890 of those hold the specific status of Stützpunktverein, clubs equipped and funded to run dedicated, low-barrier sports offers for people with a migration or refugee background.

For the whole state of Hesse, the program runs out of a Frankfurt address, not somewhere else in the state. Sportjugend Hessen’s own Integration durch Sport page lists the team’s office at Otto-Fleck-Schneise 4, 60528 Frankfurt am Main, the same building as the Landessportbund Hessen, which oversees the program at the state level while Sportjugend Hessen, its youth wing, runs the day-to-day work. State coordinator Frank Eser (069 6789-6941, FEser@sportjugend-hessen.de) and integration specialist Markus Wehenkel (069 6789-6945, MWehenkel@sportjugend-hessen.de) handle general inquiries, with team assistant Osvaldo Pinheiro (069 6789-6943) supporting both. A separate regional coordinator, Annamaria Peter (069 6789-6948), covers four of Hesse’s Sportkreise alongside LGBTQ+ youth work in sport, a reminder that this office serves the entire state, not just Frankfurt itself, even though it’s based here.

Two Frankfurt clubs currently hold the Stützpunktverein designation, and they look very different from each other. Eintracht Frankfurt, the city’s Bundesliga club, holds the status at a scale few other clubs in Germany can match. On a much smaller, grassroots level, SG Bornheim 1945 e.V. Grün-Weiss is a football club with more than 750 members from 53 nations that runs its own “Skyline Soccer” integration project and operates a family center that representatives from BAMF, DOSB, and Sportjugend Hessen have visited in person, according to the club’s own refugee-support materials. Both are genuine entry points, at genuinely different scales.

If neither of those two clubs fits, Frankfurt has a free, general-purpose search tool for its wider club scene. Mainova Sport Rhein-Main, run by Sportkreis Frankfurt e.V., the umbrella body for the city’s roughly 416 gymnastics and sports clubs and more than 292,000 athletes, lists over 1,750 training, course, and trial offers across more than 200 different sports. It’s filterable by sport, age group, weekday, and district, and it runs its own dedicated “Sport und Integration” section alongside the “#BeActive FrankfurtRheinMain” initiative, built in partnership with Mainova AG, the Frankfurter Bäder, and the city’s own Sportamt. This isn’t an IdS-specific tool, it covers every member club, but it’s the fastest way to see what actually exists near a specific address before deciding whether a Stützpunktverein referral is even necessary.

Separately, the city also runs Vielfalt im Sport, a joint portal between Sportjugend Hessen and Frankfurt’s Amt für multikulturelle Angelegenheiten (AmkA, amka.online@stadt-frankfurt.de), focused less on individual club referrals and more on removing structural barriers to sport participation across the city, worth knowing about if your family’s question is bigger than “which club” and closer to “how does this city actually approach diversity in sport.”

What Real People Say

There isn’t a large public forum thread specifically about IdS in Frankfurt, families tend to find the program indirectly, through a club, a school, or a community contact, rather than searching for it by name. Handbook Germany’s Turkish-language guide to joining sports clubs reflects exactly what community-facing advice for migrant families actually looks like in practice across German cities generally: search your city’s own site, look up your neighborhood plus the sport plus “Verein,” and lean on a community forum or Facebook group for a personal pointer to a nearby club, because there’s no single, universal signup process across hundreds of independent Vereine.

What is well documented for Frankfurt specifically is SG Bornheim’s own account of its work: a club that started as a standard neighborhood football association now counts members from 53 different nations, runs a family center that federal and state officials have visited to see the model in person, and has built its integration work, Skyline Soccer among it, into the club’s identity rather than treating it as a side project. That kind of documented, sustained commitment is a useful signal when a family is trying to judge whether a club’s Stützpunktverein status is genuine depth or just a label.

Step by Step

1. If you want a tool to search broadly first, use Mainova Sport Rhein-Main at mainova-sport.de, filter by sport, your child’s age, weekday, and district, it’s free and covers more than 1,750 offers across Frankfurt’s roughly 416 clubs.
2. If you want direct guidance to a newcomer-equipped club, contact Sportjugend Hessen’s IdS team, email FEser@sportjugend-hessen.de or MWehenkel@sportjugend-hessen.de, or call 069 6789-6941, describe your child’s age, sport interest, and neighborhood, and ask which current Stützpunktvereine near you fit.
3. Consider Eintracht Frankfurt or SG Bornheim 1945 specifically if a large-scale Bundesliga-affiliated program or a smaller, deeply multicultural neighborhood club sounds like the better fit for your family.
4. Ask any club directly about a Probetraining, a trial session, regardless of your German level, this is standard practice at Frankfurt clubs and the fastest way to gauge fit before committing to membership.
5. If cost is the real barrier, apply for the Bildungspaket through Frankfurt’s Jugend- und Sozialamt (069 212-33133), households receiving Bürgergeld, Wohngeld, or Kinderzuschlag can get 15 EUR a month toward the membership fee, no separate application form required beyond an informal notification.

Compliance Note

This page describes Germany’s federal “Integration durch Sport” program and its implementation in Hesse and Frankfurt, current as of mid-2026. Program contacts, funding availability, and which clubs currently hold Stützpunktverein status can change, so confirm current details directly with Sportjugend Hessen’s Integration durch Sport team, Mainova Sport Rhein-Main, or the specific club before acting on anything here.