HealthyLifeStyle4All: Youth Ideas Labs unveil their proposals
The HealthyLifeStyle4All Youth Ideas Labs, an initiative to give young people a voice on how to ensure a healthy lifestyle for everyone, have recently unveiled their ideas and solutions after three in-person meetings during the European Year of Youth.
The Youth Labs presented their proposals to the Commission and a wide range of sport stakeholders on 23 September in Prague, prior to the opening of the 2022 edition of the European Week of Sport.
Five key topics
The proposals centre on five topics, i.e.
- Mental Health: maintaining and fostering mental health and well-being by creating awareness in people and promoting self-care and active lifestyle
- Easy to Move: showing that healthy lifestyles can be easy, accessible, affordable and fun
- Digital Health: enabling digital well-being through non-formal education at the European grassroots sport level
- Healthy Solidarity: promoting healthy lifestyle integration in existing EU programs and actions, such as European Solidarity Corps, Erasmus+ and Youth Dialogue
- TRANSform Lives Through Sport: supporting youth trans inclusion in sport and physical activity at the European level
Youth participants also advocated for the continuation of the Youth Labs and sustainable youth engagement in the sport sector, through meaningful participation and involvement in policy-making at EU and national level.
Background
Commissioner Gabriel launched the HealthyLifeStyle4All Youth Ideas at the EU Sport Forum 2022 on 16-17 June in Lille, as a flagship initiative of the European Year of Youth and under the umbrella of the HealthyLifestyle4All initiative.
The goal of the Youth Labs was to elaborate innovative proposals related to the three pillars of the HealthyLifestyle4All initiative, focusing on
- positive contribution of sport, physical activity and healthy diets to the mental and physical well-being of not only the young but all generations
- non-discriminatory access of the youth to sport
- development of innovative skills to increase the participation of young people, in particular girls, in physical activity
- youth empowerment through sport more generally
The central thought behind the Youth Labs was to encourage young people to explore new ideas and solutions collectively, make them feel involved, and challenge them to come up with youth inspired recommendations on inclusive approaches in boosting a healthy lifestyle of all Europeans in the context of the pandemic recovery.