PLAY International
Overview
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Posted Opportunities 0
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Founded Since 1999
Company Description
HISTORIC
Sport without borders, now PLAY International, was born in 1999 from a deep conviction: sport is both a fundamental right and a way to solve the problems of our societies.
1999-2009
Sport without Borders, now PLAY International, was born in 1999 from a deep conviction : sport is both a fundamental right and a way to solve the problems of our societies.Â
This postulate inspired the NGO’s first field initiatives in emergency and post-emergency contexts. In Bolivia, Sri Lanka, or Afghanistan, PLAY has been confronted with the pressing need to invent support systems that enable children to overcome trauma or learn how to guard against a chronic illness.
In its first decade of existence, by working with hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries, PLAY and its partners have demonstrated that :
– Sport is a universal language to mobilize as few activities are able to do.
– Sport and play have their full place in the humanitarian sector and can provide concrete answers to social and health issues, including in more precarious.
–Â Physical activity and sports is a material that can do a lot with little, especially when we focus on the educational component.
2009-2019
By moving closer to the Group SOS, PLAY International has sought to amplify the impact of its action. Convinced that the development of this impact was primarily based on its ability to co-create and share quality educational content, the NGO modeled a first approach: Playdagogy.
From 2012, PLAY International has strengthened its teaching system and started to work more and more with speakers / practitioners who were neither employees nor volunteers of the association.
This second decade is also marked by the rise of a new sectoral approach: the field of action of the NGO is not limited to the humanitarian but also to the Northern countries. Sport Without Borders becomes PLAY International. The development of its activity in France, in the school and extracurricular field, testifies to this dynamic in the education sector. The creation of Playlab marks the desire to nurture an exponential dynamic in terms of social innovation. By creating a device for collective experimentation of solutions, the modeling of new approaches and the acceleration of innovative devices, PLAY International seeks to realize the social innovation potential of sport.
In its second decade of existence and continuing to work with beneficiaries, PLAY International has demonstrated :
– Its ability to model a teaching method in a reverse innovation approach (from South to North)
– That pedagogical support to the actors of fields and their networking conceal constitutes an impact model in its own right.
– That the field of physical activity and sport has considerable potential for social innovation.
VISION
LET’S UNLEASH THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF SPORT
For 20 years, PLAY International has invested in sport as a lever for education and social change. This action in the field shows that it is possible to positively impact the life course by inventing new ways of using physical activity and sport: to promote learning and develop life skills; facilitate dialogue between war-battered communities; etc
The development of Playdagogy, for example, illustrates this reality: we can learn actively and effectively while playing. This is the case in Creteil on the plague represented by sedentariness, the fourth leading cause of death in the world. This is also the case in Burundi on the major challenge of staying in school, in a country where more than one child in four does not complete primary school.
Since the creation of the NGO, a growing number of educational organizations and professionals have been using sport as a vehicle for social transformation. When PLAY International celebrates 20 years of commitment in the field of humanitarian and education, the finding remains the same as in 1999: the sport is underutilized in terms of educational and social impact. The urgency of social needs forces us today to unlock the social impact potential of sport. The scale of these needs invites us to create collective solutions and to conceive new logics of coalitions between NGOs, (social) enterprises, public actors, etc.
The next few years should allow us to fully reveal this tremendous potential. We must, and can, change the dominant representations of sport to make it a major solution to the Sustainable Development Goals *.
One of the most effective ways to increase this impact is to enable an exponential number of young people to access programs that use physical activity and sport as an educational and inclusive tool. Achieving this goal is possible by relying on the education professionals who are (or will be) in charge of these young people. It is by nourishing the daily practices of the actors on the ground, and by taking inspiration from them, that we will manage to create a concrete and lasting change.
THE 2025Â HORIZON
Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals implies a collective approach to educational, social and humanitarian action. The PLAY International project for 2025 is a contribution to this issue, in France and around the world.
During the next 5 years, the NGO sets itself the ambition to multiply, at least, the social impact of its activity by 3.
This is to boost the ecosystems of change actors in more than 20 countries in Western Europe, the Balkans, West and East Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean.
3 LEVERS OF ACTION
The project is based on 3 main levers of action.
1. SOCIAL INNOVATION AND PEDAGOGY
Co-create the most effective educational content possible, model and accelerate new solutions, develop action-research and action-research: the heart of this ecosystem relies on the identification, creation and massive diffusion of tools and practical solutions in the field by education, social action and humanitarian actors.
2. THE IMPACT ON THE FIELD
The second lever is based on engineering projects with priority audiences and within territories where the potential for impact can be maximized. It is a question of deploying these solutions with the existing actors of ground in a logic of decompartmentalization, of operational and educational continuity.
3. THE ADVOCACY
We want to contribute to the change of perception of the sport. This is the meaning of our advocacy: we must unleash the potential for social impact of sport. It’s about demonstrating the relevance of our collective actions, to create a stronger link between the world of research and field workers, or to integrate socio-sporting tools into the initial and continuous training of a maximum of education professionals.
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