Viana do Alentejo City Council (VACC) decided to participate in Erasmus+ Sport Info Day in 2020 with the purpose of understand better all the dimensions of the process. So, VACC sent an Sport Officer to Brussels to represent their public body.
We have had good fortune and we could integrate a perfect project to us, with more three municipalities through Europe. Gaglianico Municipality, as leader partner, asked municipalities from Bulgaria (Svilengrad), Slovenia (Ksko), and Portugal (Viana do Alentejo) to join his project of skills for health and sport in European Union small communities. Fortunately, we have had the pleasure to see the project approved.
After the approval, we had to assess our internal condition and try to make a plan to improve our organization in health and sport matters. H&Sport project despite made us think about improvements inside our entity, it give us 8 grand financing to operate it. The present document has the role of explain our activities about this subject.
THE MAIN PROGRAMME
Our invention is centralised in our municipal senior sport program: “Senior Health Club”, who works since 2010 with vary good outcome in the community. This enshrined program is going to make progress through the Erasmus+ project. We will to proceed to the following implementations:
- Changing the name of the program;
- Consulting service of the Polytechnic Institute in the context of the evaluation of participants;
- Consulting service of a nutritionist to ensure nutritional supervision of the participants;
- Aside the program transformations, we want to financier the partners visit to reduce public expense with this service.
Changing the name
The Senior Health Club is our central program to this European project. It is operating during 11 years and it was created to bring safe and effective Physical Activity to the local Elderly. Through the H&Sport we want do improve our intervention and spread it’s benefits to other ages. The new name is Health Club +, this way we erase the “senior” parte and we sow the seed of change. We want to expand the intervention to all ages and unite the subject of sport and health in our organization.
Consulting service of the Polytechnic Institute
After several years of work with of sport and physical activity, we had the need to assess our intervention. Are we working in the right direction? In 2019, we required the Beja Polytechnic Institute, to his Physical Activity and Health Laboratory help us to evaluate all the participants of the Senior Health Club. Between 2019 and 2021, despite the pandemic, we could assess all the group members and achieve very good results with it. In 2021-22 season, we want to renew the partnership and continue to bring benefits to our citizens, supported with scientific knowledge and know-how of this local higher education institution. The picture below shows a presentation of our work at an international congress. This partnership costs 3.000 €.
Nutritional supervision
Since 2010 VACC has a partnership with health local entity, the Community Care Unit (CCU). Nurses of CCU work together with us: they make a general evaluation of the elderly before each exercise session, promote health education sessions, and organize some sport events. With the new changes of the Health Club +, we wish to develop our partnership with this entity in favor other ages, children for example. We want to give the new possibility of nutritionist counseling members of Health Club +, and some children classes if possible. According the required budget, this service is going to cost 1.230 €.
PARTNERS VISIT
As we said before, we wish to receive until 4 persons of each partner entity. We are expecting a maximum of 12 partners, between May 5th until May 9th. The following program may suffer some changes until May 2022, but we share the sketch of it.
We wish to secure the transfers from airport to Viana do Alentejo, local of stay. Partners are going to sleep in “Alojamento Local O Convento”, a quite friendly new hotel, on municipality capital.
CONCLUSIONS
We hope we did explain all the dimensions of our intentions. In addiction of a good governance of the project budget, we want to be a good partner of yours. This project is a great opportunity to improve our skills and increment out knowledge in this matters.