Empowering Youth through Inner City Baseball
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>View discussions about this entry Country: United States
Organization: Play for Life International
Sport - Baseball
Year the initative began (yyyy) - 2007
Project URL: http://www.playforlife.org
Positioning in the Mosaic of solutions
What is your signature innovation, your new idea, in one sentence? - We help children believe in their own power and that they are agents of their own change through sports and hard work.
Describe your innovation. What makes your idea unique and different than others doing work in the field? - We believe in a meritorious system to help our children's development and create opportunities for children to realize their own potential. While we will raise funds for our children's goods and needs, it is important for them to realize they can be powerful agents of their own change. To facilitate this understanding, we offer grant programs rather than give aways, where children can earn goods or opportunities that would not otherwise be available to them. Children as young as six can apply for our grants, which can be as small as a baseball glove to as big as a scholarship to a sports camp. Through these programs, we hope to move these underserved children from a mindset of giveaways and charity to a mindset that says, "If I work hard, find the right people to help me, and never give up, anything is possible."
What are the existing barriers, the biggest problem, your innovation is hoping to address/change? - We want to change the game in impoverished areas by breaking cycles of dependence and creating a sense of power in the children we work with. By teaching them these lessons young, we hope to see them into adulthood as confident young people able to shape their own future.
Delivery Model: How do you implement your innovation and apply it to the challenge/problem you are addressing? - Through grant programs made available to our young players to provide them with equipment, pay their registrations fees, and enter them into tournaments and meritorious awards such as scholarships to baseball camps and clinics, we will emphasize the our children can accomplish whatever they set out to do as long as they work hard and take advantage of every opportunity available to them. Through this, we hope to encourage a shift in mindset from a charity-receiving entity to a grant-earning program.
How do you plan to grow your innovation? - Through the years, we will grow our programs to include international and national travel, to give our children exposure to cultures, peoples, and areas they would not otherwise have. We will grow this through aggressive fundraising. As our funds grow, we will be able to reach out to more and more youth, spreading the message of empowerment and agency.
Provide one sentence describing your impact/intended impact. - We have and will continue to provide opportunities to areas that are severely underserved and/or forgotten about through meritorious programming.
What impact has your innovation had to date/or what is your intended impact? Exactly who are the beneficiaries? - Thus far, we have been able to reach over 240 children Our goal is to reach as many children in underserved areas as we can without compromising or diffusing our message of empowerment. In the long term, we hope to teach our children lessons that will take them through adulthood. In providing these tools to our young children, we will encourage them to pursue higher education and find the courage and have the capabilities to pursue opportunities that they once thought was unavailable to them.
Please list any other measures reflective of the impact of your innovation? - Over time, we will track how many grants have been given and how many children have earned their way into programs that would not have otherwise been available to them. Finally, we will look at our success rates in getting children to engage and find new opportunities for themselves that we have not provided directly.
What are the main barriers to creating or achieving your impact? - The communities and families of the children we world with often do not have the infrastructure, emotional or organizational, to adequately support the children's needs. We have to change the children's mindsets without alienating them from their communities and provide gentle guidance. Our children often live in dangerous and threatening areas, so getting them to focus on things beyond their immediate needs consistently understandably will be tough.
How is your initiative financed (or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)? - We are financed through individual and corporate donations. We are also pursuing grants. Finally, we are looking into the feasibility of creating a physical store to sell used sporting equipment so we can be self-supporting.
If known, provide information on your finances and organization. - Please list: Annual budget, annual revenue generated, size of part-time, full-time and volunteer staff. We have an annual budget of $10,000, but that will grow exponentially in the next year. We have one full-time staff member and three part-time volunteer staff.
What is the potential demand for your innovation? - The potential demand is limitless, as sport as always been a way to build confidence and cross barriers. Given the chance to play, children will take it. So we will carry our programs and message to as many children as humanly possible.
What are the main barriers to financial sustainability? - Our project is perpetually sustainable. Finances will only affect or growth and reach. However, we have successfully operated on a nominal budget for our first year, and we could continue to do so if necessary.
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story. - My husband and I have volunteered in orphanages in Korea and after school programs in Guatemala. Throughout our travels, we have always seen children playing. And that play seemed perfect to us. When children play, they often escape the burdens of their every day lives, such as poverty, family issues, illness, and societal pressures. We wanted to harness that spirit and provide opportunities through and beyond sport to as many children as possible.
However, our work will have little meaning if we do not emphasize the long term. By teaching children not only the immediate of sport but the long-term of empowerment, we provide children with choices that they would not otherwise have. We bank on our earnestness. We are not a well-monied group, and we have promised that no less than 95% of all dollars donated will go directly to programming. We will always be grassroots, and we will never forget the children for which we fight. Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material. - Eun Jung has been a writer in one incarnation or another her whole life. She has written on foreign policy, travel, and marketing as well as being a creative writer. Her articles have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, The Japan Times, and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin among others. Eun Jung runs Play for Life International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using sports as a tool for empowerment.
Contact Information:
Eun Jung Decker
Executive Director Play for Life International (NGO) Discussions about this entry |
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Hello Eun Jung,
Could you explain in more depth the process by which individuals actually apply for the mini grants? How do kids find out about the grants and what is expected of them in order to receive them? Also, have you heard of Donors Choose? It is a website that was started by an Ashoka Fellow, Charles Best, where teachers post their classroom and material needs online and then donors respond and donate. Check it out! http://www.donorschoose.org/homepage/main.html
Thanks for your response
Dana Frasz
Changemakers
MLB has a great program called RBI, Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities. They are all over the country, and I think could really add value to your programs.
Best,
Harrie
I applaud what you and your husband have accomplished over this past year with Play for Life International, Eun Jung. Reaching nearly 250 kids with a message of hard work, accomplishment, and self-empowerment through sports strikes me as an outstanding start.
As you grow, you may have to prioritize either the domestic or international dimensions of your program. That is, will you expand your efforts to include other Chicago neighborhoods and perhaps eventually other metropolitan areas in the States, or emphasize the opportunities that you mention for national and international travel and take your Cameroon soccer partnership to other countries, too? You may not be able to do all of this equally well and quickly.
That being said, have you considered funds and grants which may be available from Major League Baseball's Community Programs? There are different ones which may be tailor-made for what you do. And you may already be doing this, but both of the local Major League teams, the Cubs and the White Sox, have community-outreach sponsorships that are worth your pursuing, too.
Steve Byars
Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California
Hi Steve,
Thank you for your words of encouragement. We are keenly aware that we need to be very focused and careful about how we implement our efforts. Balancing the national with the international will be a challenge. However, we know that one of the strengths of our programming is the emphasis on international ties. International sports programming will help our children imagine worlds they couldn't otherwise imagine and experience things that wouldn't otherwise be available to them. By emphasizing these cross-cultural ties, we hope to open our children's minds to the vast opportunities that await for them.
We are reaching out to MLB. Thank you for the suggestion, however. Please feel free to stay in touch!
Best wishes,
Eun Jung
Play for Life International
Change the Game
www.playforlife.org
Hi Eun,
I know it´s difficult to say, but do you have any idea of how well the message of empowerment you´re trying to get across helps the kids your serving in other areas of life? I can see how that works in the limited area of sports (apply yourself get a grant, however small), but do you see something similar happening for your kids elsewhere? I guess that underpriviliged children face some very real restrictions that can´t just be overcome by a change of attitude.
Jasper Nicolaisen
Free University Berlin
University Challenge
Hi Jasper,
Thanks for your question. I understand your concern that our initiative may only impact the children we work with in the arena of sport. However, we emphasize forward thinking. By showing them that there are opportunities that can be made available to them through taking the initiative, they can apply that to other parts of their lives. Indeed, we also keep our children forward-looking, my keeping them geared toward college and higher education. So our efforts our two fold - shifting attitudes and helping our children realize their own power/potential and consistently providing them with opportunities and grants that would not otherwise be there for them.
Best,
Eun Jung
Play for Life International
Change the Game
www.playforlife.org