Youth engagement

Sports Leadership camp empowers youth to create more connected communities.

Resilience relies on social cohesion, yet modern communities are highly segregated. Youth are particularly isolated from one another. One way that communities of diverse backgrounds still come together is through sport.

This summer, the Global Sport Institute (GSI) partnered with KER and Valley of the Sun United Way to pilot a sports leadership camp for high school students at Academia del Pueblo in Phoenix, where a disproportionate share of students experience homelessness.

Increasingly, more and more kids see this world as daunting and they don’t know where they fit.

Photo by Grace Valandra.

The three-week program taught students about different career paths in sport beyond being an athlete — fields like coaching, marketing, officiating, conditioning and commentating. “By raising their awareness in other ways to be connected in the world of sport, it opens up multiple avenues and places of focus,” says Scott Brooks, research director for GSI. “It’s not ‘I make it or I don’t,’ but instead it’s: ‘Oh! There’s a lot of different things I can do when it comes to sport.’”

Undergraduate participants also got on-the-job training by organizing sports clinics for middle school peers. “We could see this developing into something bigger, where we would take on not just one sport, but 2-3 sports and help run their leagues,” adds Brooks. “The kids participating in the program would run the marketing for it, go out to find local sponsors, keep track of scoring, create newsletters and really take true ownership.”

This pilot demonstrated that connecting youth of various ages and empowering them to organize their own communities around sport has the potential to increase social cohesion among future generations.

“Increasingly, more and more kids see this world as daunting and they don’t know where they fit,” says Brooks. “They want to make a difference but they don’t know how. This program can provide them with an avenue of learning about themselves, learning what it will take to be successful, and they’re given a place where they can make an impact.

“When they get this type of regular reinforcement that they are making a difference, they feel connected to something bigger than themselves.”

Photo by Grace Valandra