When We Unite And Use Sport To Support Young People Impacted By Covid-19, Everyone Wins
In May 2020, as the Covid-19 Pandemic was forcing communities, cities and countries to lock down, Laureus Sport for Good and Beyond Sport were joining forces to ensure core community sport provision to support those in need could be maintained. This became the Sport for Good Response Fund.
Today, the two organisations are jointly launching a final report which highlights the impact the fund – and the innovations to provision of community support through sport it helped create - has had around the world, and investigates the further support the Sport for Development sector needs to both survive and thrive post-pandemic.
With the support of a number of partners around the world, including Degree and the Kevin Durant Charity Foundation, Comic Relief, Zurich Foundation and the Hong Kong Rugby Union Community Foundation, the Sport for Good Response Fund has distributed more than €1.5M in grants to over 100 sport for development programmes in over 20 countries, supporting them in delivering new or adaptive provision to continue supporting children and young people through the pandemic.
The fund was available to Laureus Sport for Good programme partners, and any organisation around the world using sport to deliver development outcomes. Grants could be used to deliver new ways of supporting children and young people in changing circumstances. Funds were also used to help strengthen organisations to ensure they could continue supporting young people going forward.
As a result of the Fund, Moving the Goalposts, a programme using football to address and advance gender equality, increase knowledge of reproductive health and enable and improve school attendance in rural Kenya, were able to keep their core team in employment, resulting in continued support for vulnerable young people in the community. With the support of the Fund, Moving the Goalposts also supported 50 pregnant adolescent girls to return to education and continue their learning.
Meanwhile in Mexico City, boxing programme Transformación Social TRASO AC was able to continue operating thanks to a grant from the Fund. While the programme had to learn to work in different ways as a result of Covid-19 restrictions, the fund ensured that work wasn’t interrupted. Without the support, many young people would have had to stop playing sports throughout the pandemic.
Edwin Moses, Chairman of Laureus Sport for Good, said: “Many communities and young people not only felt the clinical impact of Covid-19, but were further impacted by social restrictions. To them, continued, safe access to sporting groups became more essential than ever. In sport, as in life, we can achieve more as a collective than individually, so on behalf of the Laureus Academy, I’d like to thank each and every partner who contributed to the Sport for Good Response Fund. That support enabled programmes to not only continue supporting young people, but to plan for the future and ensure that when we use the power of sport to transform lives, everyone wins.”
Fred Turner, Executive Director of Beyond Sport, said: “As Covid-19 started to take hold across the globe, we knew organisations working in sport for social change and their beneficiaries would be extremely vulnerable. It was essential that we move quickly, strategically and collaboratively to support our sector, creating a new type of fund that would flex to changing needs. Working through the Sport For Good Response Fund, Beyond Sport and our partners were pleased to bring together a group to offer both financial support and technical expertise - ensuring that we could all come out stronger and more resilient in the end."
