Football for Adolescences to Increase Resiliency: a Program for life-skills and youth. Erasmus Project

Project Title

Football for Adolescences to Increase Resiliency: a Program for life-skills and youth.

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

Coaches and youth workers are struggling to create situations in which adolescents can learn life lessons that can be transferred off the football pitch. Moreover, combining the struggles of running a training, with work and personal life leaves little time to develop such a curriculum and program. For this reason, this partnership will combine the power of football, academic insights and evidenced-based pedagogical methodologies to establish professionalization activities for youth workers. This Strategic Partnership does so by bringing together knowledge partners and practitioners in the field of youth work, uniting both practice and science to promote the socio-educational and personal development of youth.

The youth workers that participate in the FAIR-PLAY project will work on the notions of “resiliency” and “life-skills transfers” amongst youth. Resiliency is understood as a manner in which one reacts to their environment; specifically in the face of adverse circumstances. The life-skills transfer concerns the utilization of practical skills learned in a certain setting, in another settings. For sport participation, this means employing the lessons learned on the football pitch in other aspects of one’s life.

In order to achieve these goals, work-based learning will be combined with inquiry-based learning. Multinational work sessions will be organized in which professors and youth workers will work on current problems stemming from the actual say-to-day practices of the clubs. Subsequently, each club will engage in small-scale research projects to gauge the effectiveness of these new training materials.

In total, 9 Intellectual Outputs will be developed and 5 Learning, Teaching, Training Activities (LTTAs) will be organized during this project. During these LTTAs, 4 youth workers from each participating club will be present.

The FAIR-PLAY project will enable youth workers to develop, supported by the academic staff, specific activities to be implemented in their own club social program. This project will thus result in new additions to the Resiliency and Life-Skills Curriculum. Moreover, participating youth workers will be trained and professionalized further, within a network that enables them to learn from each other’s practices.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 449691 Eur

Project Coordinator

ERASMUS UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM & Country: NL

Project Partners

• Hibernian Community Foundation Limited
• South of England Foundation T/A Charlton Athletic Community Trust
• SPORT-VEREIN WERDER V. 1899 EV
• STICHTING FEYENOORD FOUNDATION
• INTER FUTURA SRL