• Project: Large-scale youth sport work events for inclusion of immigrants and asylum seekers
  • Project duration: 01.08.2021 – 01.06.2022
  • Project reference: 2021-1-SE02-KA153-YOU-000020541
  • Grant amount: 54.179,00 €
  • Donor: MUCF, Erasmus+ Swedish NA

Summary

What partner organizations noticed and realized from our previous experience in organizing youth work activities is a sport can bring people together, as when playing a sport together for the same team, team players are not focused on the interracial, intercultural, interreligious, and other differences between them, but are focused on building quality teamwork together respecting each other’s strengths and weaknesses and complementing each other. The sport follows rather uniformed rules and norms, language is less important for communication than in other parts of the social life, and jointly experiencing victories, defeat, and emotions create a feeling of community. But we should also be aware, that this favorable structural characteristic of sport regarding integration is not a matter of course, is not coming automatically. The effects need to be strived for. The activities have to be arranged methodically in an appropriate way by experienced instructors. When not practiced in the proper environment, sports can also lead to negative values, such as selfishness, the pursuit of fame, the desire to win at any cost, among others. So far in our work, when we tried to organize the youth sport work activities with asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants systematically, partners could not find enough youth workers experienced in the field of working with immigrants and in principles of using sports activities as methods in non- formal education and youth work.

Another problem and need that we spotted is our youth workers’ lack of knowledge and experience in the project management cycle regarding the planning, organization, and implementation of small and large- scale youth work sports events for young immigrants and asylum seekers. They were unaware of who could be their potential partners or relevant stakeholders or possible challenges and obstacles in the implementation of such events. Our project directly responds to those mentioned needs and aims to empower and enrich youth workers from partner organizations with a set of skills and competencies on how to organize and implement youth sport work activities for social inclusion of immigrants and asylum seekers (as well as other marginalized youth with fewer opportunities) and practical knowledge how to organize large-scale sports events based on non-formal methodologies, but also to explore and extract all the possible positive aspects of sports for developing consistent positive intercultural acceptance among our beneficiaries.

Specific objectives of the project are:

1.) To share existing realities in local communities and countries of partner organizations regarding the inclusion of immigrants and asylum seekers,

2.) To define and understand the concept of “large-scale youth sport work events” and raise competencies of youth workers in creativity for these events,

3.) To allow youth workers to practice their skills to managing creative youth sport work events at the national level (in the period between two activities),

4.) To share and understand challenges in the implementation of quality sport methods in youth work for inclusion and intercultural acceptance of immigrants,

5.) To build capacities of currently active youth workers in our partner organizations in using sport and non-formal education methods and activities,

6.) To discuss and understand basic concepts, values, and principles of inclusion and intercultural learning.