Overview
EDUCO – The Social Value of Sport is a two year project that began in December 2011 and is funded by the European Union Lifelong Learning Grundtvig Programme. EDUCO promotes the social value of sport, recognising the importance that sports coaches play in the development of essential social and life skills in the lives of young people as well as encouraging excellence in sport itself.
The world of sport has a lot in common with the worlds of learning and work as in all these spheres team playing, problem solving, communication and conflict resolution for example, are essential.
It follows therefore, that learning and achieving through sport can improve young (and older) learners’ all round skills and abilities and critically, in the current economic climate, enhance their chances of finding employment.
Project Promoter
Società Cooperativa Sociale BorgoRete (IT)
http://www.borgorete.it/
Project Partners
Soros Educational Center Foundation (Romania)
www.sec.ro
Wandsworth Council (United Kingdom)
www.wandsworthlifelonglearning.org.uk
DIA-SPORT Association (BG)
www.dia-sport.org
Çukurova University (Turkey)
www.cukurova.edu.tr
Nowadays welfare systems are undergoing a strong stress due to lack of resources, the same resources that in industrialized EU countries has formerly produced systems of social services providing important social functions targeted at communities. Global crisis is affecting these systems and their stability, opening the doors to the involvement and the commitment of other kinds of subjects and different political visions that could respond to the crisis of social cohesion system and enlarging social discrimination. EDUCO largely addresses contemporary social needs assuming Sport as one of the fundamental educational and social cohesion resources that operate within society communities, seeking to promote social competences of Sport Coaches through informal in service training.
Within sport organizations, the coach is a key role profile. Coaches, in fact, are those who are directly on contact with and responsible for the educational path that youngsters undergo within their sport practice.
In our opinion Sport coaches have to be openly and unanimously recognized by society as performing the key role of “educators within the society/community” and therefore also both their competences in this sense need to be recognized and valorised and their learning needs need to be addressed.
December 2011 – November 2013