Empowering Youngsters through Local S4D Ecosystems and Active Neighbourhood Champions

ongoing

The potential of sport to create social impact and to empower youngsters is widely acknowledged. Thus, sport for development (S4D) became an established instrument to achieve societal and European policy objectives, which includes the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, the proven potential of S4D can only be fully harnessed if it is provided through coordinated action and consistent messages. It means to work with different stakeholders who all have an immediate impact on the environment, routines and opportunities of young people in their specific context. This includes schools, sports clubs, the municipality, or youth centres. With it, support structures can be better co-ordinated, and education can be better aligned, so that it increases the effectiveness of the S4D approach.Against this background, our consortium of 8 partners from 7 countries develops a Local S4D Ecosystem Concept that leads into an Active Neighbourhood Champion (ANC) Course. Our vision is that more youngsters are benefitting from more, more aligned and more targeted S4D activities that are offered based on their immediate social context, and that are delivered across the different local youth empowerment stakeholders.For it, our Ecosystem Concept includes an Impact and Activation Approach that is grounded in contextualized Social Spaces Analyses and applied Youth Empowerment Approaches. This shall lead to improved local collaboration. We develop a multilingual, blended capacity building program and virtual learning hub to train Active Neighbourhood Champions who come from the variety of S4D impact fields, such as sports, youth and social work, or school, so that they better engage relevant youth empowerment stakeholders. We pilot 10 Regional Courses and implement 5 Regional Seminars in Austria, Bulgaria, Spain, North Macedonia, and Portugal. This shall lead to increased local offering of quality S4D programs, and ultimately to a S4D sector that is strengthened as a community of interest.