Is it possible to use orienteering, a sport of exploration and adventure, to foster social inclusion of young people?
It has been shown how grassroot sports play a key role in building communities and creating more inclusive societies. For this reason, the ORIENT project aims to create opportunities for young people to practice outdoor activities while at the same time discovering the local context and building social bonds with their peers.
During the summer, partners held orienteering training in their own countries to test the Orient Curriculum. All in all, the training involved around 50 sports trainers and civil society organisations’ workers, who learned to use orienteering as a means to promote the participation and the social inclusion of vulnerable young people.
Sports trainers and CSOs’ workers had the chance to learn from one another: the first familiarised with social inclusion issues and community building methodologies whereas the second learned to better organise and implement sport-based outdoor activities.
The training provided both of them with innovative co-creative approaches based onparticipatory mapping, to engage different social and cultural groups in a process of reflection on socially-significant places and in the design of routes related to the topic of social inclusion. After taking part in training activities as learners, participants are now ready to become facilitators: they will organise and carry out participatory mapping workshops and orienteering activities with young people at risk of social exclusion. To do so, they can use GEARS & IDEAS, a toolbox containing all the necessary tools to become an orienteering champion. The toolbox will teach young people the orienteering rules and regulations and will provide them with step-by-step instructions to create and draw on paper new orienteering routes. That’s not all: each participant will receive a special kit containing all the items necessary to carry out orienteering activities: compass, control points, map holder and much more.
About the project
ORIENT – Young explorers re-discover local communities through orienteering is cofinanced by Erasmus + SPORT, Collaborative Partnerships.
Partners
- CESIE (Italy, coordinator)
- BSDA – Bulgarian Sports Development Association (Bulgaria)
- WUS Austria – World University Service-Österreichisches Komitee (Austria)
- SMOC – Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
- KMOP – Social Action and Innovation Centre (Greece)
- CSI – Centre for Social Innovation (Cyprus)
For further information
Read more about ORIENT, visit the project website orientproject.eu and follow us on Facebook.
Contact Cloé Saint-Nom: cloe.saintnom@cesie.org.