Standing Together for Healthy and Safe Community
▶Summary
Background Sport is much more than just a psychical activity and its social role, especially in upbringing and education of new generations is immense. Still, commercialization and putting the focus on top level results alienated us from its basic roles, in which coaches are pedagogues and educators, using their interaction with youth not only for the training, but also for discussion on relevant topics. Starting from this, we focused on the concept of creation of life champions instead of only sport ones. Objectives Main objective was to reinforce educational and pedagogic role of sport/coaches as one of its main pillars, demonstrating relevance of sport for well-being of children/youth to the community. Specific objectives were: to develop and test the educational module for new concept of work in sport; to raise capacities of 25 coaches to implement it and transfer gained knowledge/skills to 500 young athletes; to introduce the topic to 50,000 people more, along with networking of different stakeholders. Implementation 12-month activity was inclusive and participatory, with involvement of all 3 sectors in each of its phases: research and module development; capacity building of coaches and multiplication of gained knowledge through field activities for children/youth (based on NFE methods), preparation of project follow up. Overall, it included 5 transnational meetings, 2 sport-educational camps (added value), more than 1,000 hours of online interaction (team meetings, mentoring support, consultations, etc.). Achievements Training module for coaches, with accompanying documents developed; 36 young football coaches from 5 countries/6 clubs raised their capacities to act as educators with mentoring support provided; 1,000 children/youth passed the process and received relevant information through field activities and 2 camps; 5,2 million people reached through promotional campaign, which also included 24 football stars/trainers through messages of support; consortium cooperation agreement expanded.