CONTEXT As Basketball’s governing body in England, we are acutely aware of the need to provide young people with compelling reasons to continue to engage with the sport in order to support our core strategic aim of Retaining and Growing Participation. This project will therefore aim to provide young people with the skills and experience to become social entrepreneurs and role models by empowering and equipping them to share their passion with their peers and have a direct impact on youth participation in urban communities. OBJECTIVES This project will aim capitalise on the interest in 3x3 basketball at both a community and national strategic level to deliver the following core objectives: 1) Use the power of basketball, and specifically 3x3, to promote and embed the theories and practices of social entrepreneurship within 20 young people from urban areas in the UK and Netherlands. 2) Deliver 20 youth-led 3x3 initiatives in the UK and Netherlands, evidencing direct youth participation impacts on 400+ young people in key urban areas. 3) Use the learnings identified to create a set of resources for use by new 3x3 programmes across Europe, which draw on European-wide best practice to deliver the highest possible social impacts on young people in urban areas. PARTICIPANTS We propose to identify a group of 20 young people (10 from each of the project partners) to participate in all aspects of the project, from initiation to evaluation. During the 24-month duration of the project, the selected young people will undertake a schedule of activities designed to support their development as social entrepreneurs, with the ultimate aim of setting up, managing and growing their own social enterprises in their local communities. METHODOLOGY/ACTIVITIES Project activities will be delivered via a 5-phase methodology as follows: 1) PREPARATION & PLANNING: Each partner and project lead will be centrally involved in the initial project planning process, and will be expected to commit to the quality management processes and procedures agreed. This will include attendance at regular Transnational Project Meetings throughout the project that will involve all Partner Leads, plus one member of support staff, to agree and monitor the project approach, methodology, desired outcomes and impact. 2) OBSERVATION OF BEST PRACTICE: participants will undertake 2 x 14-day blended mobility programmes in the UK and Netherlands to observe all aspects of the 3x3 programmes within each of the partners countries enabling the selected young people to fully understand how the activities could be applied within their own communities. 3) SHARING OF BEST PRACTICE: via a transnational project meeting, partners will seek to identify and disseminate key examples of best practice identified across the Phase 2 activities both organisations and share ideas on how key learnings can be applied within each of the partner territories. 4) EMBEDDING OF BEST PRACTICE: the selected project participants will undertake a 2-month long-term mobility period in order to reinforce learnings, gain valuable life skills and implement the best practice and leadership skills acquired via Phases 2-3 in order to be begin the process of co-creating and delivering a 3x3 programme within their own communities. 5) PHASE DEVELOPMENT OF RESOURCES: via a short-term joint staff training event, the project partners will agree and collate feedback and findings across all aspects of the project with a view to developing a set of resources that can be used to disseminated best practice across youth other organisations in the UK, Netherlands and beyond. RESULTS/IMPACTS The expected impacts of the project include: - a direct impact on 400+ young people in urban communities through the development of 20 new 3x3 initiatives. - increased skills level of young people, reducing unemployment and creating young role models and leaders that can have a positive impact on their communities in the short, medium and long-term. - dissemination of social entrepreneurship to other young people in urban communities, strengthening their sense of initiative and supporting their local communities. - create genuine role models for other young people to aspire to, thereby increasing social inclusion of young people in urban communities. - extensive youth development opportunities across both partner organisations, including sharing of best practice, networking opportunities and enhanced competences in young people and staff. - collation and dissemination of best practice in the UK, Netherlands and beyond.
The core objective for this project was to provide young people with the skills and experience to become social entrepreneurs and role models by empowering and equipping them to share their passion with their peers and have a direct impact on youth participation in urban communities. The project aimed capitalise on the interest in 3x3 basketball at both a community and national strategic level to deliver the following core objectives: 1) Use the power of basketball, and specifically 3x3, to promote and embed the theories and practices of social entrepreneurship within a group of young people from urban areas in the UK and Netherlands. 2) Deliver youth-led 3x3 initiatives in the UK and Netherlands, evidencing direct youth participation impacts on 400+ young people in key urban areas. 3) Use the learnings identified to create a set of resources for use by new 3x3 programmes across Europe, which draw on European-wide best practice to deliver the highest possible social impacts on young people in urban areas.
We applied for this project to address the needs identified in Basketball England's 2018 Strategic Plan, specifically in relation to GROWING PARTICIPATION by inspiring the mass engagement of Young People in playing and coaching basketball in schools and clubs. Basketball (like all sports) faces a significant challenge in retaining and growing participation due to the changing priorities of young people who want the ability and freedom to fit the sport to their own lifestyle, rather than be bound to rigid, regular schedules. We therefore recognised the need to restructure our approach to youth participation to give young people the opportunity to remain involved in the sport in a more open, less committed way. We sought to address these challenges via this project using the relatively new 3x3 form of the game, which is played by two teams of three using just one basketball hoop. There is extensive academic research which evidences strong positive impacts on young people who undertake urban Sport Development programmes such as 3x3 basketball. The research shows that young people experience “a space where they can be themselves, feel at home, gain respect...and are temporarily freed from daily struggles such as discrimination".