Sport without frontiers, “JOY” the solidarity summer starts: summer camps, workshops, nature trails

ROME – Back to the starting blocks the many and articulated initiatives of Sports Without Borders (SSF) for summer 2023. In the last edition, in addition to around 3,000 beneficiaries of Summer Camps, Summer Camps and Weekends, the well-known Onlus included around 1,500 Ukrainian refugees (mothers and children) through the project “Sport di Prima Hospitality: Ukrainian Emergency” aimed at supporting minors who arrived in Italy fleeing the war.

Families going on vacation are decreasing. The summer period, for children in particular, is a moment of relaxation, fun and an opportunity for travel and knowledge. Not for everyone, though. In our country socio-economic and educational poverty is on the increase, and there are fewer and fewer families who can afford to send their children on vacation. With the closure of schools, therefore, summer becomes a critical period especially for fragile families. This is why Joy was born, to offer an opportunity to those families who cannot afford it, to enroll their children in summer camps in the cities or to send them to residential summer camps or weekends in nature.

JOY project. It will include Summer Centers and some weekends in nature. Alessandro Tappa, president of Sports Without Borders. It is a very concrete response to the increasingly onerous needs of families. Summer, in a certain sense, is precisely the period in which there is the greatest need for free, quality educational offers for those who do not have economic possibilities and/or for those children who live in emergency situations. With the experience of the project “First Reception Sports” last summer, we had the opportunity to greatly expand our field of action and, thanks to the support of friendly sports centres, donors and volunteers, reach more and more children as well as to intercept and understand new worlds or realities, such as that of refugees. We aim to offer more and more children the opportunity to spend a summer period not only for fun, but also for training and to activate paths for inclusion in our educational-sports courses starting from September”.

Solidarity initiative for children. The project takes its name and also the legacy from the first multi-sport residential field of Sports Without Borders that took place in 2017 at Terminillo, as a solidarity initiative for the children of families affected by the earthquake in Central Italy. Since then it has welcomed (between Terminillo, Gressoney and Leonessa) over 1,000 minors, many of whom come from various emergency situations who, together with the children of the earthquake in Central Italy, have made JOY a truly special summer camp: in 2018 the children “of the Morandi Bridge”, in 2019 the refugee and asylum seeker children and the Syrian children of the humanitarian corridors in 2021 and last year many Ukrainian children, thus ending up becoming a real laboratory of social inclusion.

The meeting of different geographical origins. Given its success, JOY has become an ever-growing project, an articulated proposal that takes place in the summer period, when there is even more need for quality educational offers, free for those who have no financial means and/or for those children who live in emergency situations. But JOY is also a project that connects children and families of various geographical and social origins and is an opportunity to choose for a summer of solidarity. Those who decide to join the JOY Project, in fact, by registering their children for the JOYNATURE weekends or SUMMER CAMP for a fee, participate in a solidarity project by contributing to the free inclusion of a child who is in conditions of social fragility or in an emergency situation .

Interventions modulated according to needs. “From the first experience of Terminillo – explains Alessia Mantovani National Coordinator of the program of Sports Without Borders – we have added enthusiasm and experience and we have managed to change and modulate our intervention according to the different needs of our children and the emergencies that some experienced. We have therefore reached not only children from socio-economically disadvantaged environments that we regularly follow throughout the year, but also children in conditions of psycho-social isolation, aggravated by the pandemic, up to children from war contexts such as Syria and Ukraine. In this way SSF has been able to expand its range of action and plan activities that increase impact and effectiveness”.