Young people with disabilities are among the most marginalised groups in society – and this is not a controversial statement. It is a documented reality, confirmed by research from the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and countless organisations working on the ground across Europe. Yet knowing that a problem exists and actually doing something about it are two very different things.
CB4leisureYwD was born out of a specific frustration shared by youth organisations across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italy, Serbia and Kosovo: the gap between what we know and what we do when it comes to including young people with disabilities in sport, outdoor and leisure activities.
Research consistently shows that people with disabilities participate in physical and leisure activities at rates up to three times lower than those without disabilities. For young people, this matters enormously – because sport and leisure are not simply about physical health. They are spaces where friendships are formed, confidence is built, skills are developed and a sense of belonging is found. When young people with disabilities are excluded from these spaces, the impact reaches far beyond missing a training session or an afternoon in the park.
What makes this gap particularly difficult to accept is that most of the people working in youth organisations genuinely want to be inclusive. The problem is not a lack of goodwill – it is a lack of the right tools, training and methods to turn that goodwill into practice. In surveys conducted with youth workers across our partner countries during the preparation of this project, 48% said their existing methods and tools feel outdated and incompatible with current approaches to inclusion. Only 14% felt confident that what they were already doing was good enough. Meanwhile, 75% of parents of young people with disabilities reported that their children had attended some form of inclusion programme – but only 21% found those programmes genuinely useful in daily life.
These numbers tell a clear story. The issue is not that nothing is being done. The issue is that what is being done is often not working well enough – and that youth workers across our region know it and want to do better.
CB4leisureYwD is our collective response to that reality. Rather than adding yet another one-off workshop or short-term initiative to the landscape, the project takes a longer view: building the genuine capacity of youth workers, coordinators and organisations to create inclusive environments as a standard part of their work, not as an exception. And crucially, it does so by working not only with youth workers and educators, but with young people with disabilities themselves – as participants, contributors and leaders in the process.
The work is not simple, and we do not pretend that a single project can solve everything. But it can move things forward – and that is exactly what we set out to do.