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Sports For All

2022-1-PL01-KA153-YOU-0000605222022Mobility of youth workersongoing
Countries: PL|MK|IT|RS|EL|PT|DE|TR|CY|BG · Grant: €22,092
Physical and mental health, well-beingBridging intercultural, intergenerational and social divide

Objectives

Being surrounded with smart technologies and engaged in many daily activities which modern life of 21st century dictates, we often forget about the basic human need to stay healthy and take care of our bodies. The recent imposed lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 epidemic unfortunately even made the situation worse. Not being able to have a proper walk, jog and especially not being able to play team sports increase the stress, anxiety and idleness of everyone, especially of young people. Practicing regular physical activities is the best preventive health mechanism and a vital thing for development and maintaining healthy body. It helps children and young people to build and maintain healthy body and clear mind, reduce body weight and fat, and gives energy. Engagement in sports games provides young people opportunities for social engagement and interactions, encourage team- work, cooperativeness and leadership skills and improves the self confidence and self expression of every individual. These positive effects help young people cope with the current fast, very competitive and stressful life that we are all surrounded with. Involvement in sport activities foster decreasing of many negative feelings such as anxiety and depression and bad habits and addictions such as alcoholism and drugs and encourage consumption of healthier food, resilience and endurance. Even though the social side is harder to recognize, we as youth workers need to focus on this dimension because the social learning elements in sport can directly encourage real social inclusion of all young people, especially the ones who are marginalized. Many times sport methodology is much easier to implement since it encourage motivating and engaging spirit, where everyone realize that also the young people from marginalized background are equally important and useful. Active participation in sports of young people not only improves their health and reduces costs to health services, but if properly addressed and arranged can have great social impacts such as reduction of crime, violence, and addiction to heavy drugs, as well as encourage more active engagement in the society of the young people, including the marginalized ones. Real social inclusion is happening when the society is ready to adopt and improve the existing mechanisms, policies and programmes in order to provide equal opportunities that are useful and engaging for everyone. The sport field offers enormous possibilities for real social inclusion, because on the sport field the rules of the game are the same for everyone, regardless of their background. There are many things that we can learn from the sport: methodology, then the one that improves the health and physical abilities. For us, equally important is the social aspect of learning that take place in the sport activities, like learning to engage in a team activity, to involve everyone, to find the best role for each member in a team, to cooperate for a common goal, to not give up, to be innovative, to trust the others, to be fair-player, to respect the rules and the opponents and so on. The main aim of our project was to equip the youth workers with various sport competencies and tools which will increase the social inclusion and active participation of young people, especially the ones with fewer opportunities. The objectives of the training were to: - Share various youth work programmes and activities for social inclusion using sports as method and tool; - Share our situations regarding the inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities; - Understand the concepts, values, principles and methods of social inclusion; - Understand, test and apply the "sports for all" concept in our youth work context; - Improve the overall competences of the participating youth workers for organizing inclusive youth activities through creative sport methodology; - Share and learn from good sport methods useful for involving more young people with fewer opportunities; - Promote and apply healthy lifestyle methods and approaches among the youth workers; - Share, understand and learn how to cope with challenges in implementation of quality sport methods for inclusion and acceptance of young people with fewer opportunities; - Develop plans for new local/national workshops with using sport methods for inclusion; - Establish network of youth workers dedicating in applying inclusive sport methods and promoting inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities.

Project partners (10)