Faros Sports - Lighting their way through sports

The project “Lighting their Way through Sports” will increase the social inclusion, integration, and active citizenship of unaccompanied refugee children and youth in organised sports through training, awareness raising and capacity building and cooperation between refugee communities, civil society organisations, and sports stakeholders. The partners represent a cross-border cooperation between two Greek organisations and one Austrian organisation: 1) Faros - a non-profit organisation that provides social services to unaccompanied minors and refugee children; 2) Panelinios AC - a sports organisation providing a variety of athletics and sports activities to children, youth, and adults; and 3) Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation (VIDC) – an institute and think thank for global development issues. The VIDC Fairplay initiative is an interface for mediation and networking activities, for emancipatory and participatory initiatives and acts as a contact and advice point as well as a centre of competence in matters of anti-discrimination and diversity in sport. VIDC (Austria) will in cooperation with Faros (Greece) create a manual on best practices on preparing refugee youth for integration in the organised sports and will train Greek partners on this. Faros, who will lead the project, will use its extended experience in providing holistic services to unaccompanied minors and refugee children, to transfer this knowledge to Panelinios AC. Together, Faros and Panelinos AC will provide trainings for refugee children and youth to support inclusion in organised teams. The project provides workshops with other organisations and relevant stakeholders to discuss new and better ways of linking refugee work with organised sports. A final outcome of the workshop and project will be an easily accessible information flyer with practical tools to integrate refugee children and youth in to organised sports which will be disseminated to relevant stakeholder