Youth & Sport in Country & Remote EU

The project implemented Sport practices in 4 European remote and country areas: in Italy in the rural town of Lombardore and its surroundings, in Bulgaria in the rural and really remote area of Veliko Tarnovo and its surrounding rural villages, in Latvia in the area of Rauna and Vecpiebalga, in Spain in the town of Sant Just Desvern.The partners organizations experimented and applied a community driven strategy the demonstrated good results. The strategy envisaged several steps: 1. at each county level all the local resources, public and private have been organized and coordinated together in order to organize a program of low cost sport activities, not for profit and mainly based on the voluntary work of the involved target operators. 2. Public schools, youth centers and small local private sport organization and sport experts and athletes have been mobilized in order to organize local sport events open to youth. The considered sports have been: football as sport practiced in all countries and much loved by boys and girls, horse riding having all the partners horse local facilities, athleticism and indoor and outdoor fitness much practiced in schools with the support of teachers of physical education, folk dance (in Bulgaria) as popular loved sport activity, bicycle racing, volleyball tournaments, cross country skiing and Nordic Walking (Latvia). A large number of small local sport activities have been organized and the project really offered to youth the possibility to participate to inclusive and affordable sport activities of good level delivered by skilled sport experts. In Latvia actively participated to the project the Biathlon sport champion Toms Praulitis who also gave its advise to all the project activities and partners. The real added value of the project have been the involvement of the local sport endogenous potential of each local community, discovering new potentials, creating active participation, connections and cooperation practices between public and private organizations. The activities have been based mainly on volunteerism and on the environmental resources offered by the different locations and the existing active local actors.The project gave also a response in including different cultures and different nationalities. All the involved partners included trough the project children and young of different nationalities (European and non European) also in different moments and specially to the project end. As final activity we organized friendly competitions with young participants from the different project countries giving to them the opportunity to meet different cultures and languages.The project has been implemented mainly in schools and youth centers evaluating the strong educative action of sport and its importance in promoting self confidence, discipline, attention capacity and social abilities and of course health. We consider our project a good and simple example to be followed in relation to the experimented community driven strategy in sport, that includes play (age and stage appropriate development opportunities for young people), active and outdoor recreation and school time sport activities, competitive sport taking place through local clubs and events. We are convinced that the already described strategy can be usefully applied in several small communities in EU.