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The Unity Project – a partnership between the Rugby Football Union, Rugby Europe, UK Sport and World Rugby – forms a key part of Impact Beyond and celebrated its first anniversary in June with a two-day conference. Delegates heard how events planned in and around Rugby World Cup 2015 have made a positive contribution to the 17 participating European countries, a theme that continued into the second half of the year. Each country was ‘twinned’ with an RFU Constituent Body (CB) with the aim of maximising the impact the record-breaking tournament had in a number of key areas – from increasing the numbers of players, coaches, coach educators, referees and volunteers to improving club structure and governance and upgrading facilities. Taking Denmark and Sweden as examples, rugby is now the fastest-growing youth sport after World Rugby’s Get Into Rugby programme was introduced to schools and clubs, with a 14 and 18 per cent 76 WORLD RUGBY YEAR IN REVIEW 2015increase in player participation respectively reported in the first six months of the year alone. In other countries, the priorities lay elsewhere. World Rugby U20 Championship 2017 hosts Georgia are now much better placed to provide the kind of quality pitches associated with such a prestigious tournament after local groundsmen received hands-on training under the watchful eye of Twickenham head groundsman Keith Kent, and representatives from Kent and Essex CBs. Elsewhere, significant gains were made in women’s rugby in Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Russia and Belgium where 10 new coaches, two referees and 50 players emerged from a women’s development camp.The Get Into Rugby programme designed to maximise the effects of rugby’s return to the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro was second only to the Unity Project in terms of player participation numbers. More than 100,000 Brazilian school children played rugby regularly during PE classes in the Impact Beyond programmes were implemented around 19 events, in 320 cities and 112 unions, and involved 288,000 participants – many of them children – around the world.IMPACT BEYOND INSPIRING PARTICIPATION | IMPACT BEYOND