Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership for Youth
Funded by: the JUGEND für Europa, the German National Agency for the Erasmus+ Youth programme
Project duration: 01/03/2020 – 30/11/2021
Summary:
We applied for this project because in 2019 sport is an area of life in which people with disabilities arguably had less favourable experiences than their non-disabled peers and competitors. Typical barriers for people with disabilities to participate in sport include lacked of awareness on the part of people without disabilities as to how to involve them in teams adequately; lack of opportunities and programmes for training and competition; too few accessible facilities due to physical barriers.
The unique ability of sports to transcend linguistic, cultural and social barriers makes it an excellent platform for strategies of inclusion and adaptation. Through youth sport work and sports, persons without disabilities interact with persons with disabilities in a positive context forcing them to reshape assumptions about what can and cannot do.
Non-Formal Education (NFE) educators and youth workers/leaders working with this target group often had little or no experience in using sport as an educational tool. Many didn’t not know how to maximise the potential of sport as a method within their regular youth work, despite of the fact that sport activities can be considered one of the most valuable NFE experiences for children and youngsters.
Our project placed the above-mentioned needs and EU Guidelines/policies into action by developing new curricula and methods for empowering both youth (work) organisations, as well as the sport organisations – to increase their capacity building and human resources for quality envisioning and promoting the physical activity events (youth sport work and sport events) that thus contribute to increasing participation in quality sports by more youngsters, and especially by children and youngsters with disabilities.
Specific objectives of the project were:
- To bring positive and long-lasting effects on participating and indirectly on non-participating organisations by enhancing knowledge management with new innovative youth work and sport resources and training models/curricula in order to provide quality youth sport work programmes for inclusion of youngsters with different abilities in our communities.
- To support youth workers and sport trainers in acquiring and developing key competences as youth trainers in the field of using sport methodology in youth work.
- To engage into intensive dissemination and exploitation activities of existing and newly produced products and attract more different abilities’ youngsters.
In the project, we had five project meeting, beside meeting face to face we had online meetings using Skype, ZOOM, WhatsApp, Slack and emails in general communication. We developed intellectual outputs O1, O2 and O3 that are originally wrote in English and in the end translated in Croatian, German, Italian and Serbian by our partner organisations’ staff and youth workers. We implemented LTTA in Zagreb Croatia. In the end, we had 3 national conferences (Italy; Croatia; Serbia) and one international conference in Berlin, Germany.
Results:
We developed three outputs and they are available each in 5 languages (English, German, Italian, Croatian and Serbian):
- O1 – Guidebook “Using NFE and sport methodology for inclusion of youngsters with disabilities”;
- O2 – Curriculum “Training youth workers and professional sport trainers in using sport methodology for inclusion and interaction of different abilities’ youngsters”;
- O3 – Toolkit “Sport methods/games – adapted for using in youth / sport work for inclusion and interaction of different abilities’ youngsters”.
*Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.