Y.E.S.! Youth Empowered by Sports!

With the occurrence of these conflicts, many teachers and administrators wanted to find a way to reduce the conflicts and create a more positive school environment. There was room for improvement with life skills in Belizean youth. 

Is this need being met? How?:

Because of this need, the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Transport partnered up with the Peace Corps to create the Y.E.S. project, Youth Empowered by Sports. There are three main goals of this project:

  1. Strengthen the life skills of youth. 
  2. Increase the skills of youth service providers to implement positive youth development programs effectively.
  3. Increase the skills of parents and caregivers to communicate with youth and promote their participation in learning life skills and sports activities.

This partnership means that as a Peace Corps Volunteer I work with the National Sports Council (N.S.C.) Belmopan office and at Garden City Primary School. At the N.S.C. we are working on increasing participation in primary school sports within our district. During the school year, we accomplish this by encouraging schools to participate and assist with practices at our schools. We've seen two schools that did not have a girls team participating in football (soccer) last year start a girls team that is participating this year!. We also ran a softball tournament this past year for the first time in six years. In the summer, we ran a summer camp that offered eight sporting disciplines: basketball, volleyball, football (soccer), softball, rugby, teqball, chess and swimming. One camp operated in partnership with Special Olympics.

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