Sport has a central role in our society these days: it is a competition but also an opportunity to learn social skills. Sport can be a tool for positive social change, but can also be a dangerous tool for social and political manipulation. In order to avoid this, we must bring the positive social potentials of sport to the attention of people. As stated by the EU White Paper on Sport, sport has a very strong social role through formal and non-formal education and it reinforces the human capital of Europe. Furthermore, through sport we can strengthen the prevention of and fight against racism and violence. According to the Eurobarometer, more men than women exercise, play sport or engage in other physical activity in the European Union. This disparity is particularly visible in the age group 15-24, where considerably more young men than young women tend to exercise or play sport on a regular basis (74% vs 55%).
The aim of the project is to promote and advance the role of sport in improving citizenship skills of young people in order to build more inclusive and democratic societies by sharing and disseminating good practices in the field of sport and physical education. To this end, the project has:
- Built sustainable cooperation among stakeholders from different fields such as sport, formal education and youth work,
- Shared and collected practices and tools of improving citizenship skills of young people in order to improve inclusion through sport,
- Shared, discussed and documented different approaches, the theory and the methodology that constitutes the basis of such practices,
- Disseminated these good practices among the partner organizations and made them available in all the participating countries for a wider public in all three domains (online collection of practices and methods),
- Provided recommendations to the national sport policy administration and to the European Commission with the aim to demonstrate how to further develop the potential role of sport in communities to improve inclusion and combat discrimination.
Sport.Youth.Inclusion project has been co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission (KA2) as a strategic partnership lasting for 16 months (from 01/09/2019) in four countries of the European Union (Bulgaria, Germany, Italy and Hungary).