In January I became a trustee of Football Beyond Borders, a grassroots student-led organisation which uses football as a catalyst to cross national, racial, social, political and religious boundaries in order to ('scuse the pun) tackle inequality, discrimination and prejudice. Check out their website for more info... www.footballbeyondborders.org
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| FBB members with journalist Jon Snow on their 2009 tour of Turkey, Syria and Lebanon |
Football Beyond Borders was established in 2009, following a conversation on a train home from a SOAS University football match in which team captain Jasper Kain challenged the players to travel together to Iran in the coming summer. The hope was that a grassroots student-led organisation could facilitate cross-cultural dialogue and transcend the media hype. However, in the wake of the disputed Iranian elections that year, the team’s visa applications were rejected and a decision was made that similar goals could be met through a tour of Turkey, Syria and Lebanon. The month-long tour that followed had a profound impact on many of the players as well as the communities they visited and teams they played against. The potential of football as a tool to engage with a diverse range of issues and communities, from Iraqi refugees in Syria to Kurds in Turkey, far exceeded even the player's expectations. As a result of this initial success, annual international projects confronting specific issues pertinent to each region have taken place in Ghana (2010), Egypt, Palestine and Jordan (2011), Brazil (2012) and Bosnia and Serbia (2013). This year they are heading back to Brazil to take part in the Salvador Legacy Games, an international youth tournament to be played 2 months after the World Cup with a focus on what the legacy of the event is for the residents of Salvador’s favelas. Each team of young people will partner with a different community in Salvador in advance of the tournament and will stay with these communities during the tournament. The issues addressed in all these projects have been wide ranging, from human-rights abuses to a lack of educational opportunities and provisions. The short video below captures this better than any of my ramblings could:
What started with broad international aims found a focus closer to home following the summer riots of 2011 that started in London and spread across the UK. Many of the young people now involved in the work of Football Beyond Borders grew up in communities that were affected by the riots, and there was a mutual feeling that the skills and experiences developed through FBB projects could be well used to address some of the underlying causes of the unrest. Following the same model used in the international projects, FBB members embedded themselves in communities and began to run football workshops alongside other activities such as post-practice mentoring sessions, but this time on a long-term basis. In partnership with Youth Futures UK, a youth organisation based on an estate in a deprived part of Camberwell (South London), and Archbishop LanFranc School in Croydon, Football Beyond Borders has designed and is already delivering a wide range of projects that link young people to opportunities for their personal and professional development - whether that be in employment, education or enterprise.
So yes it's a football-based charity, and no I don't play, understand or even particularly like football. But what I do know is that sport, whether it's cricket in India, baseball in the US or football in the UK, is a powerful influence in the lives of many and provides a real opportunity to break down some of the barriers in today's society, particularly for young people. So how did I get involved?
I've been following Football Beyond Borders for some time through their founder, Jasper Kain, who is also the brother of my friend Poppy from Cranbrook School days. Jasper and one of his friends Tom Bateman (who is now also a trustee for Football Beyond Borders) came out to Sri Lanka to help in a community I was volunteering in following the tsunami nearly 10 years ago. As my blog doesn't go back that far, I've managed to dig out a few photos of our time in Sri Lanka. Those were the days....
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| Working with the hard hit community of Kirinda in the South West district of Hambantota |
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| Jasper and Tom get stuck into helping individual families recover from the devastation |
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| Our rickety old bikes used to cycle the 90 minute round trip to the community every day |
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| Football Beyond Borders 5 years BEFORE Football Beyond Borders?! |
Since his time in Sri Lanka Jasper's can-do attitude has taken him a long way from digging trenches in Kirinda, first to a degree and time as president of the student union at SOAS and now as one of the driving forces behind Football Beyond Borders' transition from an international football tour initiative to a more sustainable grassroots organisation in the UK as well as overseas. The organisation is going through a really exciting time as it formally registers as a charity in the UK, and grows in terms of partnerships, donors and beneficiaries. So when Jasper mentioned they were looking for a new trustee to act as an advisor on strategy and programme development I jumped at the chance.
So that takes us up to the reason for this blog post. On Sunday, I met with 15 FBB members to help them develop their strategy for the next three years. Up till now, Football Beyond Borders has grown quite organically driven by the raw enthusiasm of those who set it up and are still passionate about taking it forward to the next level. As is often the case with small start ups, it is currently shaped by the activities it delivers through it's range of projects, which while strong in isolation lack an overarching strategy to link them together towards clear outcomes and ultimately the impact they want to achieve.
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| Jasper sets out the agenda for the day |
In many ways the day was similar in structure (though naturally different in content) to the strategy workshops I facilitated with the Palestinian women at the women's centre in the Gaza refugee camp in Jordan in December 2012 (see blog post December 9th 1012). So we started by revisiting the vision laid out by the FBB leadership team and checking that it captured the broad aims of the organisation. Then the bulk of afternoon was spent identifying, prioritising and analysing the problems that Football Beyond Borders wants to address through it's projects. As in the case of the women's centre in the Gaza refugee camp, it wasn't clear whether the projects already being delivered were the right projects for the problems they want to address. I used the example problem of a car not starting, and how it can waste time, energy and resources to address the problem before working out the cause first - much easier to explain when you're not working through an Arabic interpreter this time! So the aim of the sessions was to focus first on the problems and then check them against existing activities to see if they provided a logical response.
Starting with problem identification, everyone was given 5 post its (what else?!) to put forward problems they thought Football Beyond Borders should be addressing through their work. Next, we clustered these problems into thematic areas, ending up with a total of 12 broad problem areas. Recognising that some of these problems fell outside the scope of Football Beyond Borders' vision and mission and that they currently have limited time and resources, we then gave everyone 5 matchsticks to vote for the 5 problems they'd like to prioritise. This very participatory democratic process means that FBB members are central to the foundation of their strategy, and I was really pleased to see that as a result of this an interesting range of problems ranging from the more delivery focused "lack of safe spaces for young people in the UK" through to the more advocacy/campaigns targeted "lack of voice around controversial issues such as economic inequality in society" (with a particular focus on the football industry) were chosen.
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Identifying problems
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| Grouping problems into similar themes |
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| Voting on problems to condense/focus 12 problems down to 5 |
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| The 5 selected problem areas - the foundation for the strategy |
Next up, we divided into 5 groups with each group taking one of the selected problem areas and carried out a problem analysis, drilling deeper into the issues around each problem especially causes and effects, then presenting back to the whole group.
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| Problem analysis |
The final part of the puzzle (or first part of the new strategy depending on how you look at it!) was to then break into 3 project-based groups: UK-focused delivery work, international-focused delivery work and cross-cutting campaigning and advocacy work. Reassuringly, these project groups were able to identify many links between the project activities they already deliver and the 5 problem areas identified and prioritised in the earlier session. However, they were now also able to see a clearer rationale for activities already being delivered as well as identify potential new activities for the 3 year strategy.
The final session of the day provided an opportunity for focused planning/prioritising for year one of the strategy, again in the 3 broad project groups. When each group presented back on their one year plans I was really impressed with how quickly the earlier problem analysis sessions had helped shape the direction of the coming year. The below scribble is my first stab at pulling it all together into some kind of visual representation of the day, but I'm looking forward to seeing what the leadership team come up with more formally and supporting them to deliver on the strategy over the coming months and years.
