“Boxing For Change”: boxing at school and in prison in Italy, Spain and Romania
The Erasmus project is underway with boxing champions for sports training, psycho-physical well-being and social inclusion.
Encourage participation in sport and physical activity and promote integration and equal opportunities through the rules and values of boxing. This is the primary objective of “Boxing For Change – #WithBoxingYouLearn!”, the project of an international nature and free of charge for the recipients, conceived and promoted by the Italian Boxing Federation (Italy) together with the partners Scholas Occurrentes – Pope Francis Foundation (Spain ) and the Romanian Boxing Federation (Romania), in collaboration with Sport Senza Frontiere and with BlancDeNoir and Eurocube.
Selected by the European Commission as part of the Erasmus “Partnership Sport” call, the project is intended for schools (secondary schools), with specific involvement of the most disadvantaged and peripheral communities, considered at risk, and for penitentiary institutions, with the involvement of 1750 students, aged between 13 and 16, and 250 young people currently detained in juvenile prisons. Each of the 37 participating schools and 5 prisons will be able to involve two classes. The format includes a practical and theoretical educational programme, with the help of digital teaching, a dedicated website and App, focused on the sports and values education of the young people involved, with interdisciplinary connections focused on five levels of intervention: training, cognitive, relational, social inclusion and ethical behavior.
Students and teachers will be able to live a three hundred and sixty degree boxing experience in an educational path that will be divided into three training moments: the practical amateur and youth boxing course, scheduled in the institutes during curricular hours, in which the children will be able to wear gloves guided by the Technicians Athletes from the Italian, Romanian and Spanish Boxing Federations, with the help of Physical Education Teachers; the theoretical course on boxing and ethical-social behavior that teachers and students will be able to view on the B4C e-learning platform, with video lessons and tutorials by qualified teachers from FPI, FRB, SSF and Scholas; the “Meeting with the Champion”, in which the Champions/Ambassadors of the three countries will discuss their experiences with the students, sharing their story as examples of a healthy, correct and motivating lifestyle.
Through the planned programming, the children will be able to acquire a series of rules, schemes and skills relating to the training of boxing discipline and its socio-cultural areas, which will allow them, in their studies as in everyday life, to have the promptness in orienting oneself or making decisions and the effectiveness and timeliness in intervening in specifically chosen situations. The project will end for everyone on the occasion of the final SSF JOY Winter Camp event, which will take place in Italy between February and March 2025 and in which the 20 children from the schools selected based on the #WithBoxingYouLearn contest will participate, with the objective of educating commitment and achieving goals through healthy competition.
The contest will give space to creativity and will see the students of the institutes involved in the creation of a video on the topic of boxing values and teachings. The winners will be decided based on the first 20 videos in the ranking drawn up by the designated Jury, made up of Teachers and Ambassadors. A workout on school desks and in the gym that will become a story, through the docu that will be produced and broadcast on the Web and TV platforms to disseminate and give continuity to the experience. Starting from May, the first of the seven activities scheduled until June 2025 will begin and will be dedicated to the training of 80 Federal Technicians and 40 school teachers, aimed at learning new ways of applying boxing to education, enhancing the social dimension , relational, ethical and preventive (deviance and violence).