Positive Steps towards more physical activity in Malta

Posted November 7, 2016

Charlene Attard is a physical education teacher from Malta whose participation in the Youth on the MOVE project sparked some now project ideas of her own. Now she is working on a string of activities with partners including SportMalta and as a NowWeMOVE campaign MOVE Agent. And all this has happened over the course of a year. Charlene joins fellow Youth on the MOVE alumni Shane O’Donnell as a NowWeMOVE guest blogger.

Earlier this year I received a Facebook notification about a new project called Youth on the MOVE, which aimed to engage youth in encouraging people to move. From a very young age, I have always been a proactive person and when such opportunity came I could not say no to it.

After five months of online training, different project ideas were starting to come into my head. The first one was ‘Less Sit More Fit’, which focused on educating participants about our rich culture through physical activities. However, a start-up project requires many stakeholders and as one of the topics was sustainable activation, it made me think to start slowly and hopefully grow as the project went along. Making use of your connections may be an easier way to create a project. And that’s how another project idea came to life.

The idea was Family #OnTheMove, a one-week course for parents with the grand finale being a family sports day on Saturday. The aim was to show the parents that quality time with their children can be easily found and spent in a healthy way. Preparation for this activity included making flyers, communications, research on traditional games and fun activities for parents and children. Thanks to knowledge I gained on event management through Youth on the MOVE, I was able to focus on the essentials needed for a successful event. This event was held in May 2016 as part of the closure of Skolasport #OnTheMove at the Kirkop Sports Complex, where I work as a head coach.

As the training progressed, my project idea developed. I still wanted to have both the educational aspect and the physical aspect included. As I am teacher and a head coach these two topics are close to my heart. The final decision was between two projects: Positive Steps and Active Breaks. Positive Steps was the first project to be born, however due to some changes in staff I was not sure that it would be possible to get the go-ahead for the logistics and equipment.

Looking at the different opportunities for sustainable partnerships, I decided to create Active Breaks as well, which continued to develop into the Active School Flag (Malta) which was launched this week. I will update you on the first steps of Active Breaks in a future blog entry.

In my next blog post I will introduce you to the project chosen to be presented during “International Seminar MOVE BRASIL: The challenge of moving people”.