With parental support to a stronger and more sustainable concept of Life Champions
Despite the epidemiological challenges that marked 2021, consortium of the project “Standing Together for a Healthy and Safe Community: Creating Life Champions” can boast of numerous activities – the initial consultative meeting and training of trainers, data collection and expert work on development of the educational module, 2 educational-sports camp, numerous consultative meetings, which resulted in more than 400 trainers of younger categories and children and youth from clubs involved who joined the family of life champions.
We are proud that even before end of the year, we are increasing that number with one particularly important category when it comes to education in and through sports – the parents. As from the beginning of the process the trainers have pointed out that apart from them both children and parents form an indispensable segment of the triangle when it comes to this topic, the consortium went a step further and decided to organize meetings with parents of involved children, so that their opinion would be included in the final considerations that this dynamic project would present to the public.
During the first meetings, project coordinator Aleksandra Knežević shared with the present parents observations from realized activities, sharing the satisfaction that children really connected among themselves, but also that they had the opportunity to train together, socialize and learn about the best values such as fair play, solidarity and tolerance. Parents also expressed their opinion, providing full support to creators of the concept, and during the meetings, new topics for future dealing with had been discussed.
As one of the proposals, Aleksandra Knežević mentioned the organization of specialized gatherings for parents, in order to go through all the topics that their children get acquainted with, thus making all actors in the process acquire new knowledge and skills.
-Parents are an indispensable link in the process and if we want to initiate real changes, they must be actively involved in it. Our focus is on revitalizing the educational and pedagogical role of trainers working with younger categories, but we are aware that success of the process will depend on all actors relevant to the process, primarily children and parents, which is why we are starting to include these two categories as well. Trainers cannot make this kind of change on their own, for real progress, we need to have receptive kids, but also the parents who will provide them with full support during this process. We must not forget the management of the clubs, with which we also plan to open consultations in the upcoming period. However, the fact that we are on the right path in every respect is best shown by the sentence of one of grandparents, stating that in 4 days of the camp we have done more to connect the region than generation of the politicians for previous 20 years. That is true support and genuine wind in the back, and we will have to justify that trust with even better and more meaningful activities, “said Aleksandra Knežević after the meetings.
The first two “parent meetings” were held in Doboj and Sarajevo, and the next one is planned with the parents of children from RFK Grafičar. By the end of the year, plan is to visit all clubs-participants in the process.
Meetings are part of the project “Standing Together for a Healthy and Safe Community” supported by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union. Project coordinator is Development Center for Youth from Belgrade, and the consortium brings together partners from the youth, education and sports sectors from Serbia, North Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Turkey.