Swim to live 2

The project has been focusing on youngsters, 12 to 17 year olds, who are not very physically active and are from an underprivileged household. We as a society are becoming more and more aware that what we learn as children stays with us for our whole lives. And the same goes for what we don’t learn. Today’s children are growing up in a world of tablets and video games. They are less and less active and more and more clumsy. And the numbers don’t lie, children are getting fatter. So what can we do about it? Children need to be more active and they need a basic physical knowledge, to make it easier in the future to learn new physical things. And swimming is a very important part of the basic physical skills. We joined 6 months of swimming classes twice a week for 5 or more underprivileged youngsters per country and one hour of mindfulness practice a week for a healthy young mind and body. Before we began with the classes we educated our instructors and social workers with a one month mindfulness webinar workshop from a renowned expert in this field.Combined with the regular practice we organised 4 transnational meetings in the three partner countries, each dealing with a special topic. The first was held in Slovenia and the focus was to teach all of the project staff mindfulness. Besides this we planned final details of the project. The second meeting was also held in Slovenia and it was the time when all of the youngsters in the project met each other and the team, did some team building activities and were taught mindfulness. The third meeting was held in Romania and the focus was on sharing good practices and use of mindfulness in teaching visually impaired youngsters. The final meeting was held in Italy, where we focused on using mindfulness in teaching swimming and other water sports like kayaking. Our innovation has been adding mindfulness training through which our youngsters have become more aware of the mind-body connection.Our plan is to implement mindfulness in regular exercise. According to new studies, physical exercise is a good way for improving mental health. With mindfulness we teach youngsters that it is OK to notice that the feelings are there, but it’s not OK to take that emotion with you, to react upon it.We also educated our instructors with the goal of receiving a Swim to Live licence. Instructors with this licence are competent in the fields of working with swimmers of different abilities, learn how to deal with the problems regarding gender, political or religious issues and of course in motivational strategies (knowledge of motivational theories, change models, etc). The ones who did not have the licence from previous year got the licence, ones who had it already worked on observing their skill and sharing the knowledge. Besides this they have gained in theoretical knowledge and got to practice the basic aspects of mindfulness which will benefit them for a lifetime. Youth workers have been educated about teaching mindfulness and how to motivate people to participate.In December we organised a Festival of swimming which was aimed at elementary school children from an underprivileged background to have a swimming lesson and have fun in the pool. Over 50 children attended the festival together with their parents. This festival also served as the final evaluation meeting for the project where we celebrated the past years accomplishments.One of our outputs is a mindfulness manual for youth workers so they can teach the basics of mindfulness to youngsters.We attended an international conference (Approaches and methods in the habilitation and rehabilitation of people with disabilities, 26 october 2018, Cluj – Napoca, Romania.) in Romania where we presented articles about the strategies of teaching mindfulness.