It would have been simpler, in many ways, to design CB4leisureYwD as a national project. Each of the partner organisations could have worked within their own country, developed resources for their own context, trained youth workers in their own communities. Simpler to manage, simpler to coordinate, simpler to report on.
But it would have been significantly less useful – and significantly less honest about the nature of the challenge.
The barriers that young people with disabilities face when trying to access sport, outdoor and leisure activities are not unique to Bosnia and Herzegovina, or to Italy, or to Serbia, or to Kosovo. They are shared across borders, across languages, across different legal and policy frameworks. Youth workers in Sarajevo and youth workers in Bologna are grappling with versions of the same problem. The specific details differ – the regulations, the resources available, the cultural context – but the core challenge is recognisable everywhere.
Working transnationally means being able to learn from those differences rather than being limited by them. A practice that has worked well in one country can offer real insights to organisations in another – not as a model to copy, but as a starting point for thinking differently. The diversity of experience across the partnership is one of its greatest assets.
It also means that the resources developed through CB4leisureYwD are stronger for having been shaped by multiple perspectives. A toolkit developed by organisations from four countries, drawing on research and practice from four different contexts, and tested with youth workers and young people across all four, is a more robust and more widely applicable resource than one developed in a single national setting.
And finally, working transnationally matters because the field of inclusive youth work itself is transnational. Youth workers, educators and organisations across Europe face the same questions, read the same research, attend the same training events and draw on the same pool of ideas. The conversations that shape the field happen across borders.
CB4leisureYwD contributes to those conversations – and the resources it produces, available in five languages and freely accessible online, are designed to reach far beyond the four countries of the partnership.