Youth in Sports: capacity building for young community sports entrepreneurs Erasmus Project

Project Title

Youth in Sports: capacity building for young community sports entrepreneurs

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 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

Background: The YouthSports.com project is a strategic partnership action involving the Italian Cooperative Social Cooperative Società Borgorete, working with City of London Corporation in the United Kingdom, the Soros training institute in Romania, Cukurova University in Turkey.
Following the road already undertaken with the Educo project (http://www.educoproject.eu), the goal is to stimulate young people between 18 and 30 years of entrepreneurial skills linked to the sport world to achieve a double result: To offer a more employment opportunity to young people and to foster the development of social skills. The so-called Sports Management combines with the most ethical concept of social enterprise, an activity the primary purpose of which is not to create profits, but to make more profitable the whole community.
Youthsport.com intends to develop training materials and an assessment framework that combines sport management with social enterprise for young people aged 18 to 30 years. This report illustrates the initial research phase on the needs of the project. The social enterprise is in different stages of development in the partner countries. Italy and the UK have a well-established tradition and regulatory frameworks, while the social enterprise sector in Romania is re-emerging after communism and is still relatively small. In Turkey, while there are more than 3,000 private foundations that undertake social change programs and which play an active role in the creation of a democratic and civil society, the social enterprise sector is still in its early stages. Internationally operating social enterprises, such as Ashoka, have regional offices in partner countries, except in Romania.

Objectives: The general objective of the project was to build entrepreneurship in young people interested in sport management. The project provided for this goal to be achieved through the creation of a training and certification course for young people (18-30 years) already involved in the world of sport, including the principles and values ​​of a community social enterprise:
– to design the sports space as a space to promote and encourage social inclusion
– adopt a holistic approach based on the athlete
– Provide constant training to sports trainers on the basis of the EDUCO project (518616-LLP-1-2011-1-IT-GRUNDTVIG-GMP)
– re-invest the profits in the community (eg by providing family services, etc.).
The project’s specific objectives were as follows:
• Create a training package for the social management of sports organizations
• Creating a European Certification (European Passport) based on a self-assessment framework
• Creating an E-space as a sharing space used by training participants
• Development of a Roadmap Paper

Partner:
Società Cooperativa Sociale Borgorete (IT); Cukurova University (Turkey); Spektrum fundation (Romania); City of London Corporation (United Kingdom) were partners in the project, bringing different skills and representing a part-nership of public-private-tertiary sector and academic world.

Activities: The activities started with a needs analysis phase, which highlighted the innovative nature of the training proposed by the project, in particular “While there are some postgraduate courses in the UK that address the themes of sustainability and social policy , We have found only one training program that explicitly unites the social enterprise with the development of sport and management, and this is aimed at entrepreneurs and is based in Melbourne, Australia. ”
In the second phase, partners developed the training package and conducted training in each country. As a fundamental part of this training course, a five-day mobility was organized in Romania (October 2016), attended by over 50 young people from Italy, Romania, Turkey and the United Kingdom. The results of these pilotings were collected by partners to build the main products of the project: The Code of Conduct for a Social Sports Company (developed in consultation with young participants) and the Roadmap Paper.

Results: The project’s results were excellent: more than 50 young people trained in 4 countries in managing social sports. The feedback from the participants was very positive and emphasized the innovativeness and opportunities created for the realization of self-entrepreneurship.

Long-term Benefits: The benefits that can be expected for the long term are the collaborations generated by the project and the projects born in the young participants. In Italy, two groups of young participants are pursuing two projects of a social sports enterprise.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 237660,54 Eur

Project Coordinator

BORGORETE SOCIETA COOPERATIVA SOCIALE & Country: IT

Project Partners

• Fundatia Centrul Educational Spektrum
• UNIVERSITY OF CUKUROVA
• THE MAYOR AND COMMONALTY AND CITIZENS OF THE CITY OF LONDON