Creating Opportunity for sport Members at grassroots level to Enable INclusion

The main idea behind the project was to increase participation of young people with disabilities in sports at grassroots level, through the implementation of inclusive activities.This purpose came fom the analysis of the situation occurred in our countries (Italy, France and the UK) from which emerged that there is a huge gap between the opportunities to do sport for people with and without disabilities at grassroots level. This lack causes for young people with disabilities, a loss in the benefit that sport brings to people in terms of social, emotional and physical development. Against this background, with the project COME In, partners were willing to prepare, test and experiment concretely a programme for sport trainers, volunteers, mentors, teachers, youth leaders to be able to create and/or adapt sport activities including young people with disability at grassroots level.The project started officially in January 2018 and involved four partner organizations: OPES (Italy) as coordinator, SPARC Sport (UK), ANESTAPS (France) and ENGSO Youth (based in Sweden but with members in all the European countries) as partners. Thank to an agreement with ENGSO Youth, the project could also benefit from the Participation of Special Olympic Europe-Eurasia which brought within the project its Sport Unified model.After several meetings online, the first face to face meeting between the partners took place in Rome (24th-26th August) when partners worked on the exchange of good practices and started to draft a programme for making activities more inclusive.In February (1st-5th) 2019, 25 people from the partners’ countries (the COME In team) met in Newquay (in the UK) to attend a training course organized with a mix of theory and practices. During the meeting, participants get to know the unified model of Special Olympics and were trained through the STEP approach (Space, TIME, Equipment, People) to plan and implement inclusive activities. Activities planned by the partners were carried out in the countries of the participants (2 in the UK;• 5 in France; • 6 in Italy) from February 2019 to May 2019. The activities implemented (their success and the obstacles emerged) were evaluated during the meeting in Rome in May 2019. The outcomes of the activities and the feedbacks of the participants were collected and used to finalize the toolkit, a guidelines in three parts, which serves as a supportive tool for volunteers, teachers, coaches to make their sport activities more inclusive. The results of the project showed that it is possible to make sport activites inclusive by taking into consideration Space, Time, Equipment and People involved and demontrated that opportunities to do sport at grassroots level for all the individuals do not necessarily imply a huge cost. A second important outcome of the project was linked to the fact that COME In was based on the inclusion of people with disabilities in all the phases of the project, also in the decision making process. The project demontrated how this approach adds value to the work of sport providers and to increase sport opportunities at the grassroots level with a real inclusive perspective. All the results were presented to the final conference of the project, organized in October (24th-26th October) in Nantes (France) . This entailed the organization of workshops involving STAPS students to test the COME In approach, and a final conference, during which the results of the project and the toolkit were presented to an audience of 300 people. On 3rd December (the international day on disability), an awareness raising campaign started online through facebook with the aim to spread the toolkit and to share the outcomes with the public favoring more inclusive attitude.