SPIELRAUM – room to play
Finding one’s own place
Where young people meet and mingle in their free time is often determined by the spaces that are available to them. Unused parking lots, run-down sports grounds, or vacant lots thus become places to meet outside schools or sports clubs. In the socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods of large urban centres, it is especially difficult for many adolescents to make meaningful use of their free time, since hardly anybody asks them to get involved in shaping their immediate environment. There are very few attractive recreational programmes, and the needs of young people are largely neglected. So how are they supposed to get something going with their sports buddies?
Your city, your room to play
SPIELRAUM – room to play, a programme sponsored by the German Children and Youth Foundation and Nike, has been created to address the needs of these adolescents. SPIELRAUM supports initiatives that, with the help of young people themselves, transform unused spaces into more lively, attractive places to be used for team sport or personal development. The programme builds on sports as a door to youth social work that is accepted by adolescents because it often matches their personal interests.
Ideally, everybody helps out in these projects: parents, neighbours, and all others who can help support young people.
SPIELRAUM is geared towards children and youth who want to share their enthusiasm for sports with their peers.
More space for development
SPIELRAUM aims to achieve more than sports, however. The programme seeks to strengthen young people’s self-confidence and their ability to think critically of their own ideas and actions, to promote ownership of public spaces, and to encourage adolescents to get involved in their own neighbourhoods. Sharing responsibility for a common meeting point provides adolescents with opportunities for personal growth. Along with their counsellors, they can discover their strengths, expand their skills, and take on responsibility for themselves and for others in order to get accustomed to living together democratically and fairly. The programme serves to overcome segmented responsibility in favour of communities of responsibility. A diverse range of actors such as youth welfare organisations, parents, child protective services, schools, or sports clubs come together in SPIELRAUM to transform unattractive locations into visible, popular spaces that become important meeting points for adolescents from the neighbourhood.
Spaces where they can do what they love doing and where they receive the support they need.
Contact and further information:
Ralf Walther, Yildiz Gümüs
Deutsche Kinder- und Jugendstiftung
Email: yildiz.guemues [at] dkjs.de
Tel.: 030 - 25 76 76 - 27
