- Country
- Spain
- Target Audience
- Educators/academics
- Local community organisations/NGOs
- Youth/pupils/students
- key themes association
- Sports
- Vulnerable youth and youth engagement in P/CVE
- Year
- 2024
Organisation
UFEC (Union of Sports Federations of Catalonia)
The Sports Federation Union of Catalonia (Catalan: Unió de Federacions Esportives de Catalunya) is a private, non-profit organisation that supports, defends and promotes sports and the value they bring to society in Catalonia, Spain.
La Unió represents 69 sports federations, over 11 000 sports clubs and more than 700 000 licensed federation members from different disciplines.
La Unió exists to provide a unified voice for sport that can articulate the needs of all of its constituent members on a larger scale than what each member is able to do on their own.
Type of Organisation: Other
Project description
SPEY (Sport for Prevention of Extremism in Youth) is a project led by the Union of Sports Federations of Catalonia (UFEC) and co-funded by the European Commission involving seven institutions from different EU countries.
SPEY focuses on the development and implementation of sports activities and transversal skills amongst youth, most of them at risk of social exclusion.
With a team composed of social educators, psychologists and trainers, the SPEY programme has been based on the 3N model (Kruglanski et al., 2014, 2019). The general objective is to prevent the psychosocial factors that can contribute to the process of radicalisation. Specifically, the 3N model emphasises three interacting psychosocial factors that can be crucial to prevention:
Needs: Refers to the quest for significance (meaning of life, self-esteem).
Narratives: Refers to beliefs, values, and cultural and identity aspects.
Networks: Refers to group dynamics, social models, and processes of influence and leadership.
The first 4 days of the project focuses on the ‘Needs’ with activities that aim to increase the personal meaning of the young people and their positive attitudes towards sports (individual level). From day 5 to 10 the project focuses on ‘Narratives’ with activities that address antisocial attitudes and risky behaviours through an alternative narrative and a counter-engagement (group level).
From day 11 to 16 the focus is on ‘Networks’ with activities that aim to strengthen the social and community network of the young people in order to improve coexistence and participation (societal level). The programme has used the scientific method to evaluate the impact of the intervention, advised on and supported by the University of Cordoba, Spain.