Promoting Rural Youth Engagement through Sport and Social Inclusion

ended

The project “PRESS - Promoting Rural Youth Engagement through Sport and Social Inclusion” aims at promoting sport as a way of social inclusion of rural, isolated and marginalised young people and as a way of prevention of bad habits such as alcohol and drug abuse among those disadvantaged groups. The partners from Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Cyprus and Lithuania will carry out local surveys to explore the available opportunities for sport in the rural and islandic settings of the partnership compiling the surveys in a Compendium on rural sport opportunities. The partnership is diverse involving newcomers in SSCP(Lithuanian partner which is a high school in the rural Silale Laukuva District), a sport club( from Poland), youth NGOs from rural areas of Bulgaria and Romania and an NGO from Cyprus working for the social inclusion of isolated islandic young people. This diversity of partners will contribute to exchanging best practices and ideas for better social inclusion of rural and isolated youth as well as building capacity in the partnering organisations and the local stakeholders they will involve in the project. Under the project will be organised 4 partnership meetings for project planning, monitoring and evaluation and exchange of best practices from which will directly benefit 82 people. Each partner will include in these meetings local stakeholders so as to build capacity in more organisations for using sport as a way of social inclusion of marginalised and disadvantaged groups. European Citizenship will be strengthened via the promotion of European Sport Initiatives as each partner will organise sport events for European Move Week 2022 and European Week of Sport 2022 in the partnership rural areas where there are less opportunities for sport, social and cultural inclusion of young people. The project will act like a role model for other sport clubs and youth NGOs motivating them to implement similar projects for the young people from remote and rural areas.