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Location -> Somasca di Vercurago in the province of Lecco, Lombardy

This project aims to offer training and education based on a sports workshop for about 30 teenagers housed in the 4 education centres of the Casa San Girolamo, run by the Order of the Somaschi Fathers.

The minors will be organised by age into small groups and will have the opportunity to do sporting activities three times a week under the guidance of an athletics trainer and a youth worker and under the scientific supervision of a psychologist. This project has great educational value and conceives sport as a factor in the children’s personal and social development. During its planning and execution, the Oliver Twist Foundation benefited from the Casa San Girolamo’s twenty years of experience in providing accommodation and from the expertise of highly qualified professionals: Stefano Tirello, an athletics trainer at international level, and Manuela Tomisich, psychologist and lecturer at the Sacro Cuore Catholic University in Milan. The project is based on the assumption that sport can be an extremely useful educational tool. Specifically, it is possible to run a good educational project involving activities that provide an opportunity for personal as well as physical expression. The physical, in this case, takes the form of team sports, perceived here as a tool for encouraging a behavioural model based on loyalty and respect for one’s companions, opponents and rules. In this way, it is possible to explain the value of individual qualities and the importance of teamwork and helping one another, and to build up the children’s self-esteem and teach them to take pleasure in victories but also to accept defeats. These are important messages for minors who, in many cases, have not had positive behavioural models, lack self-esteem and do not know how to manage their aggressiveness properly.

The Order of the Somaschi Fathers was founded in 1568 by St Girolamo Emiliani and, ever since, has worked to help minors who are alone and abandoned in 13 countries around the world, in Europe, Asia and the Americas. This educational organisation is widely recognised in the area in which it operates and has highly qualified and almost entirely secular staff. The “Tutti in squadra!” project is part of a range of established and well-run activities for the minors taken in by the Casa San Girolamo, located in Somasca di Vercurago. These activities make it possible to run educational projects effectively focused on minors’ needs.

End of project -> May 2008