Being Active! - Sports as instruments for active citizenship

The idea of the project was born thinking about potential of sports activities as tool for promoting active citizenship for young people. In fact, playing sports is one of human activities the most able to involve people without any sort of barriers, to connect people over their differences, to improve building communities and reinforcing identities. That’s why a lot of non-profit organisations, in many field of action, historically use sports activities for reaching their objectives. For example, there are organisations that use sports for promoting integration of foreigner people, of immigrants, for improving social inclusion of disadvantaged people, for reinforcing communities, for enhancing quality of life of disabled people, and many other example could be possible to mention.So, the project realised by SOS Europa was based on the purpose of creating a network of European non-profit organisations with the scope of identifying best practices, instruments and tools for using sports activities and programmes with the aim of stimulate active participation and active citizenship of young people.Essential objectives of the project were:- developing instruments for stimulating through sports commitment of young citizens in communities life and active citizenship,- identifying common instruments for improving through sports activities young people attitude to participation in social issues,- creating a table of best practices, instruments, methods helpful for helping non-profit organisations in facing problems and delicate issues in society (integration and hospitality of migrants and refuges, social inclusion of disadvantaged people, improvement of life quality, etc…),- creating a European network of non-profit organisations that use sports activities as tools for improving society,- creating a system of evaluation of results for social and inclusive activities realised through sports projects.During the project were realised three transnational meetings, in Spain, Romania and Italy, in which participants selected by each partner were involved in activities focused on the described themes, exchanging experiences, ideas, opinions and potential actions for the future. As results of these activities, the partnership produced various results, that include for example all ideas for future projects, a table of common values and parameters for creating and evaluating projects focused on sports as tool for active citizenship and social inclusion, a group of slogan and videos for awareness raising social campaigns.All results of this project are available open source on the official website http://www.soseuropa.it/being-active/