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L'Europe Sur Tous les Terrains

2024-3-FR02-KA154-YOU-0002824932024Youth participation activitiesfinalizedGood practice
Countries: FR · Grant: €60,000
Democracy and inclusive democratic participationEuropean identity and valuesAwareness about the European Union

Objectives

Since January 2025, the Jeunes Européens - France have been leading the project "L'Europe sur Tous les Terrains" [Europe on Every Field], co-funded by the European Union's Erasmus+ programme. In our societies, sport goes beyond mere competition. It is a powerful, widely recognised lever for delivering cross-cutting public policies and fostering social innovation. Through its appeal across all generations and social classes, through its pervasive presence in everyday life and in the media, and, last but not least, through its immense potential in education and health, sport holds a rightful place in current debates within political, academic and educational circles. The starting point of our project thus lay in the following observation : sport is an innovative way of talking about Europe to people who feel disconnected from these issues or who have no opportunity to discuss them. Sport is a unifying activity, founded on values that echo those established as the foundations of the European Union: diversity, inclusion, unity, peace, equality, solidarity, tolerance, democracy, and so on. Our project therefore aimed to raise a broad youth audience's awareness of the challenges, values and opportunities of European citizenship, using sport as an innovative tool for mobilisation. Through this initiative, we sought to demonstrate that sport is a particularly effective means of encouraging young people's participation, inclusion and learning. By using sporting activities as an educational tool, we aimed to make European issues more tangible by connecting them to young people's daily lives, while also making them more accessible and appealing. Thanks to its values of cooperation and solidarity, sport is a powerful driver of collective action and a fertile setting for raising awareness of European citizenship and fostering youth engagement. Our project also sought to renew traditional methods of education for European citizenship. While popular education methods are effective, we wanted to enrich them with innovative approaches aligned with young people's interests. By using sport as a means of raising awareness, we developed more dynamic and participatory activity formats, capable of reaching new audiences. This approach notably enabled us to address European issues with young people who are usually disconnected from such topics or who have few opportunities to discuss them, by creating welcoming and unifying spaces for dialogue. Finally, this Erasmus+ project aimed to strengthen our organisation's capacities, in particular by developing our educational approach and diversifying our target audience. The field of sport is indeed an essential pillar of the youth sector, through the many sports clubs, associations, federations and non-formal education structures that support young people on a daily basis. In this context, the project enabled us to better understand the specific features of socio-educational work through sport, and to explore new methods of supporting young people. It also helped to expand our network of partners by forging links with stakeholders from both the sport and youth sectors.

Project partners (2)