The International Youth Day will be celebrated this Sunday 12 August, marking the annual celebration of the role of young women and men as essential partners in change. Designated by the UN General Assembly in 1999, it serves also as an opportunity to raise awareness of challenges and problems facing the world’s youth.

A key-message to launch on this occasion is to ensure youth a “safe place”. It means civic spaces that enable youth to engage in governance issues, public spaces that afford youth the opportunity to participate in sports and other leisure activities in the community, digital spaces that help youth interact virtually across borders with everyone, and well-planned physical spaces that can help accommodate the needs of diverse youth especially those vulnerable to marginalization or violence.

When youth have safe spaces to engage, young people can effectively contribute to development, including peace and social cohesion.

Let’s join, as the European sport movement, this global event by celebrating young sporting people as the inspiration, ambassadors and future of sport, and by committing to provide safe and enjoyable sporting spaces and experiences for youth to practice sport and compete.

To support this ambition, we invite all young European athletes to share on their social media how sport is their “safe space”, using the official UN hashtags #YouthDay #SafeSpaces4Youth and mentioning also @eoc_media on Instagram and @EOCmedia on Twitter, so as the EOC can then repost.