For over 10 weeks, IANS in partnership with Municipality of Durres, educational directorates and schools in urban and rural administrative units of Durres Region was able to identify, invite, engage and train over 122 young boys and girls through an “after school program” - “Peace and Resilience” (PR Program). Prior the start of the program, IANS experts, in close support with the Juvenile Correctional Centre of Kavaja and the National Coordination Centre for Countering Violent Extremism developed a resource and training manual that described training methodologies and lessons for a 10-week sessions program.  The module has been designed as a tool to assist coaches, trainers, youth workers and other professionals working with young people in carrying out sport-related exercise in boys and girls aged 13 to 18 years. 10 sessions included in this manual have been carefully designed to address a specific set of life skills and took place in sports centres (as extra-curricular sports’ activities) and other community settings. The exercises in the module were designed for mixed groups of girls and boys. Depending on the context, all exercises could be played by groups of the same gender, if required. By incorporating knoledge and information about life skills through sport, the program aimed to prevent crime, violence, violent extremism by addressing these important factors:

• Young people's knowledge of crime, violence and the use of radicalism, including their perception of risk.

• Young people's attitudes, including positive and negative behavior, are influenced by beliefs that have become the norm. These are exaggerated beliefs and misconceptions about the prevalence and acceptability of certain actions such as the use of radicalism and violence, as well as the attitude of others. These beliefs become the person's norms and influence their behavior.

• Normalized Beliefs: The process where your perception of something, or others' beliefs that you should or shouldn't behave in a certain way, becomes a norm that influences your behavior. If this belief is based on incorrect information or misinterpretation of information, the norm is false.

• Young people tend to form exaggerated beliefs about the attitudes of older teenagers (for example, “almost all the popular students at my school use cannabis”). The issue can be addressed by normative education: correcting expectations according to the norm and trying to disseminate accurate information on the prevalence and acceptability of violence, crime or radicalism.

This manual consisted of 10 sessions, each of which dealing with a specific goal. Each session lasts about 45 minutes of theory and 45 minutes of practical sports activities that promote team spirit, awareness, fair play and inclusion as tools through which participants can build their coping mechanisms and reduce vulnerability and urge to break the law, for behavior violent or for the use of radicalism (Tab.1).

The module was developed in Albanian language, and it was fully supported by the Smart Balkans Communication and Visibility criteria’.  Upon approval, Institute for Activism and Social Change uploaded it in the Regional Youth Platform dedicated to the program. https://smartrenet.com/documents-resource/