Youth Integrity Ambassadors Programme (YIAP) holds first European training course

The Youth Integrity Ambassadors Programme (YIAP) recently held its first European Training Course for Young Ambassadors in Portugal. The Erasmus+ co-funded Programme aims to train and empower young people and make them active Ambassadors of Integrity in Sport.

EL supports the partnership with ENGSO with its extensive experience in working with the topic of integrity, especially in the field of sport. The Programme was launched by the two organisations during the 2022 European Week of Sport.

The partnership involves 9 partners from 7 countries: Sweden, Italy, Lithuania, Slovenia, Ireland, Portugal, Belgium.

First European Training Course

Built on the best practices of all the partners involved, the organisations put together their expertise in order to support young people in being protagonists of a positive change in their own communities.

A common understanding of integrity was established at the beginning of the week thanks to the guide of the European Lotteries (EL), main associated partner in the project and Paul Standaert, President of Panathlon Belgium and Secretary of Panathlon EU Brussels, as the Keynote speaker. Paul presented the Integrity Management Framework, and brought to light examples in the sport field in the Gymnastics Federation in Flanders, and the far-reaching initiatives taken, in order to control cross-border behaviours.

Each partner then offered its expertise from workshops to breakout sessions, in order for the young people involved to have all the necessary resources to be the leaders of positive change.

Next steps

Thanks to the educational path followed during the training course, and the ideation of their local activities with the main objective of dissemination, the young ambassadors will now train nationally their peers to actively identify, prevent and react against dishonest, chicanery and crooked practices within the sport sector. Their local campaigns will contribute to spreading the culture of integrity at the grassroot sport level among youth communities, sport clubs, schools and universities, by taking into consideration the knowledge on the contents and the tools acquired during the European Training Course.

At the same time, they’ll be active online. Using the online tools and platforms they’ll identify as the most adequate for their local contexts, the dissemination campaign will be continued online, to open spaces of discussion about integrity among young people and also to maximise the impact and the number of people reached.

The development of the Training Course was the first step for testing the educational path put together by the Youth and Sport Integrity Expert Committee in the last months. Through the feedback of the new young ambassadors and of the partners involved, OPES will now take care of finalising a toolkit that will contain all the steps to replicate the training and to organise the local dissemination activities.

The following months will be then dedicated to dissemination and to train new young ambassadors, testing once again the educational tools and reinforcing the sense of integrity in the local sport communities. Representatives of the national teams will then gather in Sweden, in March 2024, to present the results of their actions and campaigns, during the final YIAP events hosted by the Swedish Sport Confederation.

By sharing the same core values of responsibility, sustainability and integrity, ENGSO and EL continue to strengthen their collaboration for sport integrity.