The SEARCH project – Sport Education for Active and Responsible Citizenship through Health caring – is aimed at training young European citizens and at concretely proposing an intervention to organize different realities related to the dissemination of culture and sport. The project aims at increasing young people’s awareness of the importance of sports-related issues, potentially resulting in behaviour focused on well-being, inclusion and full citizenship.
Enhancing sports education has to be a key objective for every administration: it is enough to consider the highly negative impact of sedentary life in modern society. Besides the human drama linked to the emergence of diseases related to bad habits and little movement, a poor propensity for motor education entails high social costs as people who get sick need care and support from the national health system. We are not simply talking about increasing the space for motor activity, but about intervening systemically in spreading a culture which embraces sport and all its values in order to have a long-term economic response in saving public spending.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
OBJECTIVE 1): Enhance the educational activity of sport
Sport plays a decisive role in the education of children, it is an opportunity to train body and mind, it helps developing the ability to learn (know – know how to do – know how to be) and giving rise to a sort of guide allowing to reach maturity with lightness and pleasure. Physical activity creates a high level of satisfaction and wellbeing, based also on human values obtained by the participants/trainees.
OBJECTIVE 2): Encourage sports practice to control national health and social costs
Investing in sport allows savings in health care reducing sedentary lifestyle. Socio-health cost savings are a cross-cutting result obtained at different levels as is well known and proven in all research worldwide. First and foremost, prevention, but also therapy, reconditioning, reduction of relapses and all this is even clearer if we speak about gender medicine.
OBJECTIVE 3): Making sport a force for social inclusion
Sport is a fundamental element on an emotional and social level, it is a multidimensional, dynamic, playful environment, able to enhance the self and body awareness. It is also a good way to be brought out of isolation and to socialize. The European Parliament in its “White Paper on Sport” resolution included and broadened these issues by defining sport as a factor of social inclusion and reaffirming the importance of sport at school. Inclusion processes are linked, on one side, to the construction of the link between young people and local community, while on the other, they examine the expression of subjectivity as the result of representations and interpersonal relationships involved in sport and motor activity.
OBJECTIVE 4): Increase the economic activities related to sport
The first definition, which is more limited, restricts the scope of the survey to people working in the sector and to the economic effects of major professional sport and large-scale events. The second includes also indirect effects such as the purchase of clothing and sports equipment, sports tourism, the purchase of sports newspapers and publications.
OBJECTIVE 5): Turning cities into “smart-sport city”
The challenge concerns opening and permanence of the egalitarian public space. The aim is to bring citizens to live parks and communal areas that are perceived as public sports facilities available to entire communities.
