Nowadays people with disabilities deal with barriers when they want to pursue their careers in all the sectors, also in the field of sport. In fact, athletes often face challenges to kick off their sport career, sometimes due to interpersonal obstacles (lack of self-esteem), lack of intervention at policy level or due to organizational difficulties in the some organizations, in which sometimes there’s a lack of trained staff.
The project IMPACTS – IMproving Para-Athlete Coaching and Training careers in Sport aims to exchange best practices to improve career opportunities in sport for disabled athletes who wants to be coach or trainer. Moreover, the project activities want to establish links between sport clubs and athletes as well as sharing best practices and experiences in the relationship between sport and disabled athletes.
Why sharing best practices?
Sharing best practices simply means to learn from others and acquire working methodologies and teaching from past experiences, improving in an effective way own work in the daily activities and creating a wider impact within the community.
Between 8th and 9th June 2017, the 4th transnational meeting of IMPACTS has been held in Palermo in order to have an overview on what has been implemented up to now and decide what kind of actions need to be taken in the project next stages.
In fact, the testing phase is going to be the next step of the project: the whole partnership will test the identified sport good practices which allow to develop those competences necessary to be a coach or a trainer. Each country will collect feedbacks from both athletes and coaches in order to understand the strengths and the weaknesses of the identified activities, thus improving them and gather them in a handbook. This final product aims at giving motivation to athletes with disability and to promote their participation in the sport field.
Finally, the meeting has been a chance to organize a dissemination event with the members of the local IMPACTS network and the project partners: this has been a chance to exchange opinion and give more feedbacks on the previous steps and products of the project, allowing to get benefits from this process of mutual enrichment.
About IMPACTS
IMPACTS – IMproving Para-Athlete Coaching and Training careers in Sport is an ERASMUS + – Collaborative Partnerships | Sport project. Its partnership is composed by the following partners:
- EURICON (The Netherlands – Coordinator)
- Merseyside Expanding Horizons (UK)
- Centro per lo Sviluppo Creativo “Danilo Dolci” (Italy)
- Hacettepe University Faculty of Sport Sciences (Turkey)
- SPGN (Netherlands)
- SPON (Poland)
For further information on the project, please, contact marta.orozco@danilodolci.org.