Erasmus+ KA154-YOU · Youth participation through conflict mediation

PROJECT MOTIVATION

This project stems from a need that we have observed time and time again in our work with cultural and educational organisations: opportunities exist, but they often do not reach those who need them most.
Erasmus+ and other local, regional and national initiatives offer a wide variety of cultural and educational activities for young people, but the fragmentation of provision across many of these organisations means that too many activities go unnoticed.
As a result, young people with fewer opportunities, those facing geographical, economic or social barriers, continue to lack real access to experiences that could transform their lives.
Our experience working with children, teenagers and coaches has allowed us to observe and experience hundreds of situations over the years that highlight the lack of training in emotional and support skills among youth workers.
This reality has prompted us to create a specific project within a sports association, where young people spend much of their time and are accompanied by other young people and adults, the coaches.
This project focuses on providing these coaches with the knowledge, skills and tools that will enable them to fully support the adolescents who spend so many hours with them, beyond sport. For these young people, coaches are role models with whom they share important moments and dreams at a fundamental stage in the development of their self-esteem and self-concept, which is why holistic support is necessary in addition to technical support. With them, they learn important skills such as empathy, teamwork, resilience, humility and the ability to work hard.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES:
Objective 1: to provide young people with tools for emotional management, conflict management and community integration mechanisms.
Objective 2: To provide young coaches with the knowledge necessary to understand the neurological, emotional and pedagogical reality of the young people they work with, acquiring an effective method that can be applied from day one.
Objective 3: To create youth support groups, supported by coaches, to facilitate the inclusion of young people in the community.
PROJECT RESULTS
•Club volunteer coaches: they can benefit in two ways: - by increasing their ability to positively influence the young people they support, acquiring knowledge and skills in emotional management and conflict management. This is a need that they expressed as a priority when we carried out the initial diagnosis. It will allow them to broaden their scope of action with young people, going beyond sport and enabling them to work with young people on aspects of behaviour and peer relationships that can also have a positive impact on their homes, schools and the communities in which they live, acquiring transferable skills, as emotional and conflict management can be applied in their work, family and other areas of their public and private lives. This is an important incentive for many of these young people, as in an increasingly competitive job market, these skills can be a significant advantage in advancing their working lives.
•Young people participating in Club activities: in terms of personal development and the ability to transcend their origins and feel like members of the communities in which they live, conflict resolution activities can help them to put themselves in other people's shoes, understand the cultural and legal reality of the country in which they live, learn to live in coexistence between their culture of origin and their host culture, etc.