Dream Football Program
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>View discussions about this entry Country: India
Organization: Dream A Dream
Sport - Soccer
Year the initative began (yyyy) - 2007
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Project URL: http://www.dreamadream.org
Positioning in the Mosaic of solutions
What is your signature innovation, your new idea, in one sentence? - Empowering children from vunerable backgrounds by developing life skills using sports such as Football as a effective medium
Describe your innovation. What makes your idea unique and different than others doing work in the field? - Most conventional intervention models hope to empower children by focusing on meeting basic needs. In the long-run this will not ensure that the child will be successfully integrated into the community and lead an independent life. Meeting the Right to protection and right to survival is not enough. Our innovation focuses on the Right to development of the child. Using sports, amongst other mediums, to build critical life skills to help a child deal with challenges of daily life when they move out of the sheltered environment. The idea is unique because a) It uses Football which is an under-served and inexpensive sport in India b) It use partnerships with volunteers, coaching academies, corporates and shelter homes to sustain the program c) It complements the work done by nonprofits by picking up children who are already part of some intervention - the low hanging fruit as we describe it. d) It uses life-skills assessment tools to track progress e) Uses sports in combination with other mediums
What are the existing barriers, the biggest problem, your innovation is hoping to address/change? - The biggest problem is that most children from vulnerable backgrounds do not have access to opportunities to rise above their situations. While Basic Needs are critical, they are not enough. To help a child transition from a dependent environment into an independent, self-respected existence - building life skills is critical from an early age. A sustained, consistent expsoure to a sport can do that very easily as intrinsically it is an effective medium to build life skills.
Delivery Model: How do you implement your innovation and apply it to the challenge/problem you are addressing? - Exposure to any kind of sport intrinsically develops critical skills such as disciplines, responsibility, team-skills, leadership skills, decision making amongst others. With consistent exposure these skills get imbibed in the beneficiaries with the right input of technical coaching and life-skills tools. The children attend 2 sessions a week of 1.5 hours each and while the coach focuses on developing the technical skills on the game; we at Dream A Dream focus on helping children also become aware of the life skills being built through the sport through circle time, games, activities and focus group discussions. The children are also part of atleast 1-2 more life skills programs such as creative arts, civic awareness, computer education, adventure, mentoring, etc. which complements the skills built here. An integrated package is what helps develop life-skills. Children are offered prizes for attendance, good team-work, helping each other, etc. thus reinforcing the life skills. the environment is conducive to learning and no interested child is taken out of the program
How do you plan to grow your innovation? - The SPT Sports Academy has provided full support to scale the program. They are willing to provide trained coaches whenever and wherever we wish to scale the program. The goal is to increase the intake in the current batch to 50 children and parallely look for more venues where new batches can be started. Since, its a low-cost program, the idea is to tie-up with public schools and seek their support in providing us their grounds twice a week to run the football sessions. We are also engaging in a volunteer recruitment drive to involve more volunteers in the program, have tied-up with a UK Gap-year agency to get us consistent International volunteers and also getting a company to support the program and help us scale operations inturn giving them branding benefits. The program has tremendous potential to scale and over the next three years we see the program reaching out to over 300 children.
Provide one sentence describing your impact/intended impact. - Empowering children from vulnerable backgrounds by developing life skills using sports such as Football as a critical medium.
What impact has your innovation had to date/or what is your intended impact? Exactly who are the beneficiaries? - The biggest achievement of the program so far has been the regular attendance and high interest levels of the children. We have had over 88% attendance in the last six months of the program. With the addition of 16 new children in the Oct-Dec quarter, the interest among the children has only increased. The program has both boys and girls and this has helped improved gender interaction. Over the next year, we eagerly await to see how the life skills are impacted through this program as we start collating data. Children's participation in tournaments, inter-group and inter-gender interactions, the drop-out rate in the program and from the centers, their academic performance will be some of the indicators of the success of the program.
The beneficiaries of the program are children from slum communities around Bangalore coming from very low-income families. The children are in a 10-14 age group and come into the program through Dream A Dream's partner charities.
Please list any other measures reflective of the impact of your innovation? - The consistent attendance of the children is a key measure of impact (88% in the last six months). Some observable feedback that we have received from the Partner NGOs include that the children's attention span and concentration skills have improved, their attendance at school has improved; the physical development of the children is also visible as compared to other children who are not part of the program. We have developed a life-skills assessment tool that will give us consistent data in the future.
What are the main barriers to creating or achieving your impact? - Drop-outs amongst children is a key concern area in most of our programs. Many children drop out as they grow older because they want to start earning money or runaway from the centers / homes or are taken away by the families to go work and earn some income for the family. Girls tend to drop-out as they reach adolescence. Measuring life-skills impact is a challenging area. We have developed some tools and hope these will give us some interesting insights over time.
How is your initiative financed (or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)? - Currently, the initiative is financed through contribution made by individual donors. The program is very low cost right now having spent $ 1000 in 8 months since it started. However, the idea is to get a corporate to pick up the football team and give them publicity benefits which would be very beneficial when the kids start participating in friendly matches and school tournaments next year. SPT Sports Academy has already subsidized the cost substantially by providing us the venue and good quality coaches pro-bono. The academy is also committed to help us scale the program to hundreds more children as and when we can find venues and work out logistics.
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. Annual Budget 2007-08 - Rs. 6 Million; Annual Revenue generated 2006-07 - Rs. 3.2 Million
Full time staff as on 1.10.07 - 7 Part-time staff as on 1.10.07 - 4 No. of Volunteers - 600 What is the potential demand for your innovation? - Dream A Dream started the program with 12 children in the pilot phase and within 6 months we have increased the intake to 26 children. We are looking to scale the program to 300 children in 3 years. With the success of the Hockey, Table Tennis and Football Program, there has been an increasing demand from the children and partner charities to include more children in the sports program. The potential is over 600 more children that we work with.
What are the main barriers to financial sustainability? - Sports is still considered a luxury in India and donors prefer contributing to more tangible interventions such as basic needs - food, clothing, shelter, education. lack of awareness and pre-conceived notions amongst donors may be the key barriers to funding and financial sustainability. lack of venues and good coaching academies or high cost of procuring these services may affect the financial sustainability of the program too.
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story. - Dream A Dream was started by 12 young people in November 1999. Started work with HIV+ children, we understood the core issue of isolation of children from vulnerable backgrounds. isolation from the community and also access to opportunities. We also realised that in most conventional small non-profits, while the basic needs of children such as food, clothing, shelter, medication and education are taken care off; the children do not get access to opportunities for their personal development or for developing life skills which are critically needed if we have to keep them off the streets and ensure they successfully integrate with the community. Dream A Dream started building its competencies in this critical area of developing life skills. The goal was to build these skills in a fun and engaging environment and we started identifying mediums such as creative arts, sports, adventure, computer education, story-telling, etc which can build life-skills. We have been running the Hockey and Table Tennis Program for 3 years and saw tremendous success. More and more children wanted a sports program and hence we decided to start the football program in partnership with SPT Sports Academy. Just like Hockey, we believe Football would also act as a great life-skills development tool and we have been proven right in less than one year of the program.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material. - Vishal is the Co-founder & Director of Dream A Dream. As Director, he is involved in the vision achievement, strategic direction and day-to-day management. Vishal is an Ashoka / AIF Fellow (www.ashoka.org) and also a trainer on fundraising strategies, NGO Management, Governance and Organizational Development. A B.com graduate from Bangalore, Vishal has 3 years of corporate experience with Xerox and Technology Holdings. He is also a co-founder of ITIHAS, a strategic consulting setup for NGOs.
Contact Information:
Vishal Talreja
Cofounder and Director Dream A Dream (Non-profit trust) Discussions about this entry |
This programme really works.
Its amazing to see in action and it really does work.
Coming from the UK where football is by far the national sport, its fabulous to see it taken up with such enthusiasm and joy here in India. In the UK, so many clubs and sub clubs exist to coach and train and inspire the youth of the country - in India this is not so, and even if it was would not reach out to these children from vulnerable backgrounds, who, as always, miss out on crucial development stages.
Dream a Dream is providing critical skills for these children to learn - just take a moment to think about football and what it takes to play and you will realise how far these children can go - working in a team, making split decisions in the heat of the moment, recognising the importance of keeping healthy for a healthy mind, sportmanship to your opponents, managing agression and team spirit - ALL transferable skills which are essential to develop to help other area's of their lives, and build confident, rounded adults who can enter into adulthood positive and head held high.
Good work Dream a Dream, keep it up.
Hayley