Events: Ireland vs Italy - Dublin, 17th August 2005

 

No European at-risk children-devoted projects can work out if children are not personally involved, if we do not take care for their needs, for their thinking mechanisms, for their necessity to create and to shape their own identity as adults before their parents.

As to the Fourth Italian National Survey “Eurispes”, 37.8% of the kids and 52.5% of the teenagers interviewed dream to become a sport champion (sample analyzed 10,000 questionnaires for 7-11 year-old kids and 12-19 year-old teenagers in Italy).

Football and consequently its champions is a mere “factory of hopes”. Such a psychological mechanism is essentially structured on the need anyone has to identify with a hero that reflects our hopes to success, which have not come true yet or which we intimately desire to ever achieve.

The promotion of a project like Espair with remarkable media happenings, getting sport champions and stars involved is the right way so that a higher number of sport and education operators may be familiar with the project objectives. Most importantly, the message is to be spread to disadvantaged young people that are the main target of our engagement: there is a new chance to make it in life.

For these reasons and willing to promote the objectives of the project Espair as widely as possible, we decided to cooperate with notable international institutions of the sport world, having great visibility.

On August 17, 2005 we realized an event in Ireland during the football match Italy-Eire in cooperation with the EU, UNICEF, Fingal County Council, Football Association of Ireland, Federazione Gioco Calcio Italiana (Italian Football Federation). Before the match kick-off, players entered the ground wearing sweatshirts with the logos of Espair, the E.U., of UNICEF and the wording “Dontdropout”. The sweatshirts were then given as a gift to the youth sport centers in the Dublin area.

Millions of people watched the event in Eurovision on the network Sky.