Ariadne's Thread for Youth Deviance

The Ariadne project aims to promote volleyball as a tool to reduce youth marginality and deviance, issues that increasingly affect young Europeans. The main target group are highschool students between 14-18 years old. The partnership is composed by 5 partners: Province of Arezzo, as lead partner, Katerini Municipality, Riga Volleyball School, Public Institute for Sport Nova Gorica, ICARE Association. The project foresees a bottom-up approach with students and the presence of experts in youth deviance: volleyball games will be organized in schools with the supervision of the experts, then the students will be asked to write essays with personal reflections on marginality and youth deviance. Essays are a good way to evaluate the project impact. The experts will then be able to evaluate both the behaviour during the matches and the writings of the students, reporting the most serious cases to parents and teachers in respect of privacy. This bottom-up approach with young people does not require particular organizational costs: volleyball games in schools have no costs for the partners and neither do the student’s essays. This will make easier to replicate the project's approach to other realities and European regions. Partners will also participate in the European Sport Week by organizing volleyball tournaments for students and, on the final day, a volleyball game in the town square hosting some professional volleyball players who will play together with the students. The communication strategy is built upon some relevant aspects: the presence of volleyball professional players and Nova Gorica as European city of Sport in 2021. The visibility will be enhanced also by the celebration with volleyball games of the National Days against Bullying and Violence and the European initiative 1DayMore4Volleyball. Partners will also join the European Antibullying Network, to ensure a continuity of the activities and of the partners' efforts also after the project lifetime.