SARU - SPORT AMBASSADORS IN RURAL AREAS

Our Mission

The mission of the “Sport Ambassadors in Rural Areas (SARU)” project is to offer support to enable communities in the less priviledged areas to organize attractive sport events and thus trigger local community building as well as boosting sport engagements and reach higher touristic and economic impact. The main activities of the project are built around the development of a training material in the field and conduct ambassadors to acquire the most important basics for track planning for nature sport races. The methodology on how to plan and build tracks and venues for outdoor sport events and sport races is developed by consortium members, who are all experienced outdoor race organizers, and is spread to smaller sport clubs, and sport representatives of youth associations/municipalities in marginal rural areas.

To Whom

Staff and volunteers of sport organizations (increasing and systemizing knowledge on track planning)
Stakeholders, staff of sport clubs, youth clubs, municipality in rural areas
(awareness of importance of sport and sport events, knowledge on track planning, action plan)
Local citizens/youth in rural areas (final beneficiaries)

What we would like to achieve

General aims:

To collect and systemize knowledge on aspects of planning an outdoor sport event in terms of venue and track planning
To transfer systemized knowledge to those disadvantaged rural settlements, who might lack the know-how and resources to organize an event but who are open to learn and be rural sport ambassadors of their local area.

Specific objectives:

To collect good practices and quality indicators of organizing outdoor sport events
To systemize knowledge and set up common methodology and quality system in the field
To share common know-how and create ambassadors in own organization
To educate local rural ambassadors about the developed methodology
To set up an action plan with selected ambassadors for their location

Who are we

The consortium consists of 4 partners from 4 countries (HU, EL, ES, SK), each of them active in the field of organizing sport events and sport races in nature sports (MTB, trail running, Nordic walking). They are an influential sport actors in their region and aspire to spread the mission of social and economic growth through sport in rural areas.

Why new

Our project’s innovative aspects lie in its specific features and down-to earth approaches. It offers models grown out of real experiences of partners. It is also innovative in the way, that it does not speak in a theoretical way about the importance of sport and social inclusion and cohesion, but offers very concrete, sport branch specific approaches, picking up those elements which help to take the first steps in starting from scratch. We believe that theoretical documents and policy papers are essential to lay down directions and strategies but to trigger real changes, well grounded, real models, with real connections and well-based practical information are needed.

Why is it good