Improve refugees' life conditions in Greece

Dear Friend,

Hello, first and foremost I am writing to you to express our gratitude for those who have supported us thus far and to inform you about all the wonderful things we are achieving in our projects in Athens, Lesvos, Ioannina,Paris. 

My name is Ruvi; I have been with YSR for 2 years now and am still in love with the work I do. YSR never fails to surprise me with how connected the team & community is. Everyday is something different, so here are a few highlights of recent life in YSR:

In Athens, our big goal is to expand our integration and inclusion project by making the gym more accessible to people with disabilities. Therefore we have been attending lots of training sessions to become more knowledgeable about this. Recently we attended an ‘Inclusive Mindset & Accessibility’ training hosted by Me Alla Matia and given by Christos Meletis, athlete, inclusion trainer, and social worker which focused on accessibility, identifying barriers and how to remove them

In the project, we held a super fun volleyball tournament on Sunday with over 50 participants, it lasted five hours and the winning team won New Balance goodies!!! As the summer has now come to an end the classes and the bodybuilding area have become very crowded due to people coming back from seasonal work from the islands and from holidays. We are super excited to see people back. 

Due to Lesvos being a pass by destination we are trying to get  more local people to come partake in our project  so we approached The Aegean University in order to have the students join as volunteers. The University is open to work together and will spread information among the student body and students associations. As for now we have managed to get students from Aegean University (Erasmus) involved in the gym, attending not only special events like the anniversary (participated in climbing and their own football team), but attending other activities regularly. 

We celebrated 7 years of YSR with 7 sporting events. We organised an event per sport, including special trips, competitions and tournaments in Bodybuilding, Running, Climbing, Kickboxing, Basketball, Volleyball and Football, and celebrated at the end with a big party in the gym with food, music and pompones, all together students, volunteers, staff and  partners. We started our football tournament with daily games. Everyone is super excited. We have a YSR team, a team from other NGOs, as well as a team from Erasmus students and, of course, from our community! The games go peacefully!!

In Ioannina, we organised a  climbing competition which was a  big success. Over 40 people joined and a lot of others watched the climbers with juice in hand. We attended The Ioannina Lake Run together with a big part of the Habibi.Works team and it was so fun. We also had a week full of volleyball. Guus and Marloes from LKTBF provided us with a volleyball course to help some coaches from Athens and Lesvos and of course the volleyball players from Ioannina become certified volleyball coaches .It was amazing 15 people graduated successfully from the course.

In Paris, we participated in the '10k of the Grand Paris' run  and it was super. Mahmood, the fastest of our team, achieved it in 36 mins. There was a fitness competition with our partner 'La Vilette workout' and two of our coaches, Mohammad and Mory, won 3rd and 4th position. We are really proud of them!! Through the artist that we have done sport and art workshops with, we were invited by the Austrian embassy to attend the exposition of the result of that workshop and we did a presentation of YSR, attended by the head of the embassy with some athletes and public members. 

Thank you a lot for taking the time to read. We really appreciate you supporting us. It really means more than you think.  

Kind regard, 

Ruvi