Highlighting the importance of integrity within local communities: Youth Integrity Ambassadors Programme (YIAP) project
Through the Youth Integrity Ambassadors Programme (YIAP) project, ENGSO Youth aims to contribute to young people’ skills development and empowerment, in line with the European Commission’s European Year of Skills. This year we decided to work on “How to promote integrity in sports?”. In February 2023, 36 young leaders joined the YIAP training course, and are now ready to disseminate the newly gained knowledge within their local communities.
Celebrated on July 15, the World Youth Skills Day, established in 2014 by United Nations, highlights the importance of equipping young people with skills for employment, decent work and entrepreneurship.
Get inspired, get involved, get skilled.
This year, the day also occurred in conjunction with the European Year of Skills, an initiative led by the European Commission to support skills-related activities and events across Europe, and to promote skills development in conjunction with relevant stakeholders such as the European Parliament, member states, education and training providers, chambers of commerce…
Aligned to the purpose, during these past months, ENGSO Youth engaged with young people to contribute to their empowerment and the acquisition of new skills and competences, in and beyond the sport field. With the YIAP project, and the support of 8 partner organisations, 36 young people followed a one week program to develop the competences to spread, promote and defend integrity in sports.
During the training course each national group elaborated specific plans to apply this new knowledge into their local (sport) communities. We are alrwady seeing the first results.
So far, four local activities have been developed with the support of the partner organisations.
EUSA decided to bring YIAP to two important events in the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana: The May Games, organised by the Student Council of the Residents of the Ljubljana Student Centre; the Happy Day of Volunteering. Managing to reach local and international students and engaging in significant conversation about the topic with them.
The key objective of their activities was to raise awareness and promote integrity in sports, by playing mini basketball, memory games and asking quiz questions on the topic of discrimination: How to tackle prejudicial views in sports? How to implement tools against discrimination?
RF Småland, supported by the Swedish Sports Confederation (coordinator of the project) and Svensk Friidrotts Ungdomskommitté, held a first workshop in Bosön (Sweden), within the framework of the new ENGSO Youth flagship event European Youth and Sport Platform. After an introduction of the project, the participants discussed some “case studies”, situations happening in the sports field and possible solutions to apply, always taking into consideration the integrity point of view. More is coming in September.
OPES ambassadors developed two actions: in March and June. They managed to involve kids and young people, and addressed the following topics during the workshops:
-The importance of integrity and sound principles in sport;
-How martial arts value can be a vehicle of integrity;
-Confrontation with different people as a method of overcoming one’s limits.
The workshop was concluded with a practical test as a demonstration that sport and martial arts are practicable by everyone without any limits.
The team from Lithuania was pretty busy on July 22nd, hosting the activities together with YIAP LSFS participants in collaboration with the Lithuanian Olympic Committee, and the Special Olympics Lithuania ambassadors. All teams had amazing experiences and managed to engage various people to discuss the topic of integrity. During the activities, they also addressed the topic of discrimination in sports, ways to fight it, and explored examples of unfair actions in sport.
More activities are planned for the future.