Empowering young men through sport

País: United States

Organization: Play for Life International

Year the initative began (yyyy) - 2007

Main barrier addressed: Low self-value and stability leads to risky choices
Main insight addressed: Create credible choices and opportunities

Describe your program or new idea in one sentence. - Through sport, we engage young men and boys and help them understand the power of self-determination and seizing and creating opportunities for themselves.

What makes your initiative uniquely positioned to create change in your community? - Many groups bring programs in under the guise of charity. However, our programs focus on a meritorious system that encourages our children to take responsibility for themselves, create opportunities for themselves, and to help them understand their own power. 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."

Describe how you organize and carry out your work? - 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.

What is your plan to scale and expand your innovation into your community and beyond? - 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.

What other resources, institutional, or policy needs would be necessary to help sustain and scale up your idea? - To expand our programs exponential, we will need to be aggressive in our fundraising so we have a strong cache from which we can provide more grant opportunities. It's really just that simple.

Describe your impact in one sentence, commenting on both the individual and community levels. - We have and will continue to provide opportunities to young men and boys that are severely underserved and/or forgotten about through meritorious programming.

What impact has your work achieved to date? - We have been able to provide opportunities and grant opportunities for children in our program in places where such opportunities are sorely lacking. Aside from building self-esteem and helping our youth understand their power, we also fight the battle against idle time. By providing our young men with a positive alternative to violence and other activities that will lead them down a road they will regret later, we hope to end cycles of violence and underachievement in the areas we work.

Number of individuals served: We have been able to reach over 340 children in our seven months of existence. Our young men have come to understand that we are constants in their lives, and we will provide them with a positive environment where they will be encouraged to grow and improve themselves.
Community impact: The communities we work in lack the resources necessary to keep their young men safe. There a numerous negative activities that lure the boys. We work to keep the boys engaged in programs where paths of violence are less and less alluring.
Society at large: By helping these young men realize their potential, we hope to produce a generation of young men who are productive contributors to society. We also hope to instill them with a sense of community and responsibility for the health and safety of their communities.

What measure do you use to gauge your impact and why? - 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.

How is your initiative currently being financed and how would you finance further expansion and/or replication? - 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.

Provide information on your current finances and organization: - a. annual budget
b. annual revenue
c. sources of revenue (please provide percentages if known)
d. number of staff (full-time, part-time, and volunteers) 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.

Who are your potential partners and allies? - We work with community liaisons and the Chicago Park District. In the future we hope to work with RBI Baseball and FIFA.

Who are your potential investors? - Potential investors are corporations, individuals who are dedicated to advancement through sports, and professional athletes and sports teams.

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
This field has not been completed
Play for Life International
(Sports and children)

Submitted by: eunjung.decker

Discussions about this entry

Collaboration

by International MSW on Enero 7, 2008 - 15:17

In checking out your website’s blog, it looks like a lot of exciting developments have blessed your organization lately. In particular the 501 status (congratulations!) and the new partnership with the African Volunteer Football Academy. I am curious about the objective of partnerships and how they benefit your organization. In a quick google search, or by consulting the other Changemaker’s competition (Sports for a Better World) I can see that sports are a recognized medium for encouraging social development. Are you actively searching out additional partnerships? Or do the communications necessary for collaboration distract from PFLI’s mission and purpose?

Todd Hoskins

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE PARTICIPANT
University of Georgia, School of Social Work

Collaboration

by eunjung.decker on Enero 10, 2008 - 17:32

Hi Todd,

Thank you for your comments. We take collaborations on a case-by-case basis. Over time, we would like to have many more international and national partnerships to allow our children in different areas learn from one another. However, we have to grow on pace with our capabilities. To take on too many partners too quickly wouldn't benefit our mission. Does that answer your question?

Best,
Eun Jung

Play for Life International
Change the Game
www.playforlife.org

re: collaboration

by International MSW on Enero 11, 2008 - 13:42

Yes, that does answer my question. I think you bring up a good point that " taking on too many partners wouldn't benefit our mission". As I am learning about the ngo sector I have taken a particular interest in process of "mission creep": where a group may become distracted from foundational goals in order to pursue legitimate side issues. I don't imagine your partnership with the African Volunteer Football Academy would represent such a case as your organizations appear to have many similar values. What do you think?

Thanks,
Todd Hoskins

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE PARTICIPANT
University of Georgia, School of Social Work

Thanks, Dana. As suggested,

by eunjung.decker on Noviembre 14, 2007 - 21:01

Thanks, Dana. As suggested, I added some photos of our programs in play!

Play for Life International
Change the Game
www.playforlife.org

Its great to see you

by danafrasz on Noviembre 13, 2007 - 17:05

Its great to see you entering another competition!
Feel free to attach some photos if you have any and we could use them to profile your competition in our weekly feature.

Keep up the great work.
Dana Frasz
Changemakers

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