Sportz Village Foundation launches new partnerships for transformation

‘Sport For Change’ becomes widely accepted in India’s development sector, and Sportz Village Foundation begins new collaborations to use sport to promote change.

In order to promote good change in communities via sports, Sportz Village Foundation, India’s largest youth sports platform for social change, has launched “Sport For Change” initiatives in government schools and new partnerships with top corporations. Sport has established itself as a crucial tool for community growth and transformation in the areas of physical and mental health, education, gender empowerment, the development of life skills, and young leadership. Investing in youth and children’s sports helps realise the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child’s Right to Play as well as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (OHCHR).

The Muthoot Group recently helped Sportz Village Foundation implement the “Sport For Change” initiative at a number of government schools in the Bangalore area. Through the power of sports, the Muthoot Group CSR programme seeks to improve the educational and developmental results of poor children. With the aim of raising the academic, social-emotional, and fitness levels of the children, the Sportz Village Foundation baseline sports education programme and structured sports curriculum will be introduced and implemented at the government schools, affecting more than 1200 students in Grades 1 through 5.

Sportz Village Foundation

With the aim of ensuring a smooth return of over 2000 students (grades 1–8) to schools and enhancing the fitness, academic, and social-emotional levels of the kids, Sportz Village Foundation launched an in-school physical education programme across a cluster of schools in Bengaluru and Delhi NCR as part of yet another innovative partnership with Decathlon India. With ongoing capacity building, execution support, monitoring, and effect assessments by Sportz Village Foundation, the programme also intends to train and enlist Decathlon staff volunteers to deliver the structured sports curriculum in the partner schools. Since 2014, Decathlon India has been committed to the idea of “Sports for School Children.”

The Sportz Village Foundation’s Sport Education curriculum was implemented throughout a group of schools in the Bengaluru area as part of a comparable employee-led CSR programme by Thomson Reuters. The Thomson Reuters employees who volunteered to serve as mentors in their respective schools and interact with children through lesson plans and activities were trained by the Sportz Village Foundation. School games included Kabaddi, Dodgeball, Volleyball, and Throwball were the program’s grand finale.

“It’s wonderful that sport is finally being acknowledged for its influence on a much larger scale. We at the Sportz Village Foundation have spent the last five years making a difference in the lives of thousands of kids through sports. And it still astounds me how much “play” encourages positive transformation in kids from underprivileged backgrounds. The Sportz Village Foundation’s Parminder Gill stated, “There is a real sense of accomplishment and pride as we see children playing in our partner schools, Sport Development Centers (SDC), or High-performance Learning (HPL) Centers and as we inch closer to Sportz Village’s mission of getting 100 million children to play.

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