Sports and physical activities are valuable motivators for social inclusion and integration, as they provide opportunities for marginalised and underprivileged groups of people – especially youth – to interact and integrate with other social groups.
KMOP – Social Action and Innovation Centre is participating in the European initiative ORIENT – Young explorers re-discover local communities through orienteering, which stems from the idea of bringing together young people from different backgrounds through a particular grassroots sport: orienteering. The project aims to enhance social inclusion and to foster capacity and community building by creating opportunities for young people from different social and cultural groups to socialize and develop new skills.
As part of the project, the ORIENT Anthology has been developed, aiming to represent a source of inspiration for new sports initiatives and new forms of engagement of vulnerable young people. It is the result of the collection of knowledge, tools and methodologies linked to the practice of orienteering for social purposes undertaken in all partner countries of the project as a desk research and a field research, the latter involving 60 sport trainers and CSO workers and 60 young people through questionnaires and interviews.
The Anthology consists of the following sections:
Collection of good practices on orienteering for social inclusion
This section presents successful previously-implemented orienteering initiatives selected across partner countries and at international level, providing a concrete analysis and explanation of the potential of orienteering in working with vulnerable young people who suffer from social exclusion.
Methodological Focus
This section presents a set of adaptable and replicable methodologies to animate orienteering-based activities able to support the social inclusion of young people. This section is the first step towards the identification of methodologies and tools to be included and further developed in the ORIENT curriculum.
Lessons learned
The last section includes conclusions based on the findings of the good practices analysis and the field research, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approaches.
The ORIENT Anthology prepares the ground for the development of the ORIENT Curriculum; it serves both as an exploratory study and a foundation basis for the local training for sports trainers and CSOs workers.
You can download the ORIENT Anthology HERE.
