At the Root of Grassroot Soccer

“I love being part of Grassroot,” a coach said to me as I was doing a qualitative data interview with her.

Her sentiment was not what interested me; I’m pretty sure it’s damn near impossible to find a coach who doesn’t feel that way.  What interested me more was that she simply called the organization “Grassroot” – not by the full name “Grassroot Soccer” or the accepted abbreviation “GRS.”  This is not the only time I’ve heard people refer to the organization simply as “Grassroot,” and more often than not, when in the communities where we work, the second part of our name seems to be hacked off and an s is tacked on when people talk about us.  “The guys in the yellow shirts are from Grassroots,” you would hear, or, “I love the work that Grassroots is doing.”

It’s important that when it comes down to name recognition, people are opting for the word “Grassroot” over “Soccer” when conjuring up our name.  They choose to call us by a word that I can bet most of them don’t understand and one that which I don’t think many who even work for GRS have thought about how the organization embodies, or does not embody, its meaning.

Thanks to GlobeMed and its globalhealthU curriculum (P.S. It works), I have developed a greater understanding and appreciation of grassroots health movements and believe that they are the most effective method of creating long-lasting, effective change.  I define grassroots movements as those in which the community members, the laymen, the ordinary folk, are the drivers of change.  They are ones that challenge traditional power structures with their “bottom-up” approach, and they are so effective because those demanding change are deeply invested since the issues at hand involve them directly.  I’d be happy to discuss this more over a cup of coffee, or as of recent, a rooibos cappuccino, so I don’t need to bore you too much about my philosophy on community development.

During his recent visit to Port Elizabeth, I was speaking with Grassroot Soccer South Africa’s Managing Director James Donald and brashly blurted, “We seem to put so much focus on the soccer part of our name but never the grassroot part.”

This discussion came about when I was making the joke that the Headquarters office in Cape Town seems like a “Little America,” much like many cities have their own Chinatowns and Little Italies (Italys?).  The team in Cape Town has a large proportion of American staff and interns, and they’re being controlled by the Global office in Vermont that’s chock full of other – you guessed it – Americans.  James is only one of the handful of South Africans at headquarters.

This was a question that has been on my mind recently but I hadn’t quite vocalized it until now.  We seem to shove soccer down people’s throats (refer to the previous blog post to read up on my feelings about that), but we seem to not care for the principle that gave us our namesake; well, the first part of it, at least.

“How grassroots are we really?,” I asked James, a rhetorical question that a part of me still wanted answered.

On the surface, Grassroot Soccer does not seem very grassroots at all.  It’s almost as if our founders, interestingly enough 3 Americans and a Zimbabwean, thought the name would fit without completely figuring out how the organization was supposed to reflect it.  Maybe our managing staff has subconsciously stuck as close to that 3-to-1 ratio as possible.  Nevertheless, from the high-level perspective, Grassroot Soccer is not grassroots at all.  If the work of Grassroot Soccer is being controlled from desktop computers in offices around the world by people who are separated from the communities being affected, what role does that that leave the coaches on the soccer pitch and the kids who they serve who live and work in South Africa’s most vulnerable communities?  If community workers are not becoming “drivers of change,” is Grassroot Soccer really a grassroots movement?

We can say a million times over how much we are empowering a new generation of leaders with our staff, coaches, and youth participants.  From this critical perspective, however, they seem more like pawns in a game being led by greater outside powers instead of true changemakers being molded into the people communities need in order to make a difference.

In order to grapple with this dilemma, I first want to take a step back to share an anecdote.  A few GRS staff members have approached me and my intern partner with the idea of starting a new NGO.  Obviously, I was wary, but I heard the idea out and helped them develop it further.  The NGO would be a youth development program delivered in schools that equips students with the knowledge about the contemporary struggles of young people in South Africa, trains youth to engage others in these vital conversations, and molds them to adults who can mobilize change in their communities.  Who knows how successful this will be, but it showed me that brains are working, and Grassroot Soccer has helped cultivate creative minds of people who are passionate about making a difference.  This is the grassroots movement.

The grassroots element of GRS doesn’t quite show in the organization’s management, but I realize that it does exist in our sites.  Not every single staff member, coach, and participant has been privy to the “GRS Juice,” as it is often called, but there are definitely some out there who are drunk on it.  Without the experiences given to them by Grassroot Soccer, they may not have realized their own potential to be drivers of change.  I’m not saying that each person has to create the next great organization that will change the lives of millions, but I realize that each time a coach works with a student, he or she is catalyzing a grassroots movement for community health.  By sharing his or her knowledge about HIV, that person is motivating another to change their behaviors and beliefs.

This grassroots element was exactly what brought me to South Africa to join the grassroot soccer team.  Partnership is another component in effective grassroots movements because it allows for exchange in knowledge and resources that a single entity may not have on its own.  That’s what I’ve seen as my purpose for being here, to forge cross-cultural partnerships, and it’s the reason why I’ve enjoyed being a Programs Intern at the site-level: to learn from the people who live day-in and day-out in the communities where we work who know firsthand the issues affecting their neighborhoods to provide whatever I can to aid in the process.  It’s their passion in the micro level that drives the organization as a whole, and it’s my role to contribute my knowledge, skills, and perspective that will allow them to realize their potential.

With this discussion of the importance of grassroots mobilization, it’s sad to know that I’ll be straying away from this true “grassroot” essence of the organization for the remainder of my time in South Africa.  In a rather sudden turn of events, both of the Port Elizabeth and Kimberley sites in South Africa will be closing at the end of March.  The reason behind this is primarily because of a lack of funding, and this is a tough lesson in NGO non-profit management: if funds don’t come in, you can’t keep doing your work, no matter how important it may be.  It’s just how the cookie crumbles.

I will be finishing off the rest of my four months in South Africa at Grassroot Soccer’s headquarters in Cape Town, and funny enough, I will be part of the Partnerships team.  I guess it’s a suitable role for the kid preaching about cross-cultural partnerships, right?  I look forward to this new opportunity in my internship, almost a 2-for-1 deal it seems.  I will be able to see and learn about different facets of the organization, get to work with new people, and explore a city that I love with great depth.  But that doesn’t take away from the bittersweet feeling I have about leaving my adoptive home in South Africa after 8 months.

Port Elizabeth, as much as it was not exactly a place I ever would have thought to end up, has been awesome to me.  It’s no New York City, but that allowed me to be more self-reflective in ways I never was before.  And more so than the place itself, I will miss my staff who have grown on me in many ways.  It’s hard to pack up and leave to the other side of the world, but having the Grassroot Soccer Port Elizabeth family as a wacky support system has helped the transition immensely.  Seeing the passion, dedication, and growth of my staff and coaches is what I came here for.  They’re what I’ll miss most because they exemplify the true essence of what this organization’s mission is: they are the real Grassroot Soccer.

In Search for One-Size-Fits-All Solutions

One of things I’ve done a lot recently is transcribe interviews and focus groups from some of Grassroot Soccer’s South African sites concerning the all-girls SKILLZ Street program.  Considering those recordings alongside some conversations and focus groups of my own, I began to think more critically about the role of soccer in Grassroot Soccer’s model.

Soccer is truly at the core of Grassroot Soccer: it’s in the name of the organization, after all.  Countless organizations out there are doing similar, stellar work in terms of youth development and HIV awareness.  Though there are many initiatives that differentiate us from the pack, using soccer is what makes our model most unique. The sport-for-development sphere that we occupy is our niche, and integrating the cultural infatuation with soccer and the need for sexual health education is what makes Grassroot Soccer novel.

In the past few months, there has been an organization-wide structural focus on impact over output, meaning that we want to ensure effectiveness of our programs amongst our participants instead of churning them out like butter.  In doing this, we wanted to bring soccer back to the forefront of our programs.  The power of soccer to educate young people was the impetus for starting the organization, so it should be our priority to keep it that way.

This begs me to question: is soccer truly effective at communicating our message?

A quick and dirty answer to this question is yes.  Grassroot Soccer is a leader in ongoing research on sport-for-development, and study after study shows that youth are gaining knowledge and confidence throughout our entire spectrum of specially-designed curricula.  I could also state the obvious that soccer is an effective hook for engaging young people. Youth in South Africa, and in much of the world, are in love with the game.  Soccer’s biggest championship isn’t called the World Cup for nothing.  If soccer weren’t an international powerhouse, our programming wouldn’t be thriving in communities across the globe thanks to implementing partners the Peace Corps, effectively bringing our curriculums to dozens of countries in 5 continents.  Soccer works.  But to what extent does soccer work?  This question came up frequently in many of the discussions I’ve had about our programs.

Many images of the developing world use this idea of soccer as a uniting force, as a tool for communication, as a universal language.  I don’t refute that capability at all.  In many of South Africa’s townships, you could see groups of kids kicking around a makeshift ball made of tied up plastic bags.  If that isn’t dedication to the sport, I don’t know what is.

I recently finished an inspiring book, Outcasts United, an account of female Iranian immigrant Luma Mufleh starting a refugee soccer club in the sleepy Southern resettlement town of Clarkston, Georgia.  Soccer became a way for her players, young newcomers from over a dozen countries, to cope with their traumas and aid in their process of assimilation.  The team bonded over their shared, but varied, histories.  It also gave them a sense of refuge, the thing they made the troublesome trek across the globe to obtain.

But this worked because those young boys, from countries like Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Iraq, Kosovo were all deeply passionate about soccer.  News flash: not everyone is crazy about soccer, even in countries and cultures where becoming a famous soccer star is the pinnacle of success.  We can acknowledge the high regard that soccer has for many, but we have to accept that soccer does not always reign supreme everywhere.

In a discussion about our all-girls curriculum, coaches suggested that there should be less of a focus on soccer.  This seems to be in direct opposition to what the organization wants to do.  However, the reasoning was sound: girls didn’t want to play it.

If you refer to my previous post, it’s important to remember that female soccer players are heavily stigmatized, and their participation in soccer is a blatant reversal of gender norms.  If a girl plays a sport in South Africa, it’s netball, a hybrid basketball-like game.   If she were to play soccer, there are often serious, potentially life-threatening repercussions.  Yes, our programs force young people to question and challenge gender norms, but this is a perfect example of where it’s hard to practice what you preach.

One of the biggest reasons girls didn’t want to play soccer wasn’t even some kind of grand societal reason.  Since SKILLZ Street happens after school, the girls are wearing their mandatory school uniforms that often consist of a matronly blazer, a crisp white dress shirt, a pair of clunky Mary Janes, and the cincher – a skirt.  This is definitely not the best sporting attire.

Many coaches themselves are not in the slightest bit interested in the sport.  In one discussion, a coach suggested, with the support of fellow co-workers, that the curriculum should be altered to include alternatives that would interest the girls more.  “Even a tea party,” she threw out, even though I’m sure nobody past the age of 5 really cares for tea parties.  The soccer aspect of the program often deterred students from attending sessions.  When someone working on the front-lines tells us to lessen our emphasis on the sport that provided our namesake, what does this feedback alert to us? 

It makes us weigh our priorities.  Which is better: delivering our program with less emphasis on soccer with the hopes of engaging a greater amount of youth or keeping our focus on the sport to be the vehicle for our messaging, but risk the possibility of lower attendance or decreased interest?

I’ve thought about this in reference to myself, as well.  I haven’t played soccer in my life, unless you count one time I subbed in a pick-up game at the Football for Hope Centre in Khayelitsha where I just ran up and down the pitch.  I have no interest in soccer, nor do I have any concept of how the sport works.  When I was the age of our target audience, 10 to 18, I was a thousand times more interested in music than I was in anything remotely sport or athletics related.  In middle school, I somehow worked the system and took choir instead of mandatory Physical Education.

If you told the young me that there was a singing program that also managed to teach about HIV, I would have been the first to sign up.  If you told me there was a soccer program that managed to teach about HIV, I would have tried to avoid it at all costs.  If I had to attend it, I may have learned a thing or two, but I would have dread going to it.  It wasn’t made for me.  Don’t even bring up the fact that I would have been sitting in a class discussing how boys should always respect a girl’s decision when it comes to sex and how boys should avoid getting girls pregnant when I knew very well when I was the same age as our participants that I didn’t like girls and wasn’t going to get any of them pregnant.  The default assumption of heterosexuality in Grassroot Soccer’s curriculum is yet another reason why it would not have been the most beneficial to me.

What this investigation has led me to conclude is the reinforced notion that no single approach works for everyone.  This is not only relevant to Grassroot Soccer but to all non-profits.  We have to come to terms with that fact.  There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution.  We can’t go on thinking that we can change everybody, regardless of how much time and research goes into making our programs the most impactful.  What we can do is adapt: to identify those who would most benefit, and make a concerted effort to change those specific people’s lives.  I think that Grassroot Soccer has realized this and is making changes to their recruitment strategies and program implementation in order to make it happen.

I wholeheartedly believe that soccer can be a powerful tool in the fight against HIV, and we have evidence that has proven that many times over.  However, we need to be humble: count our wins and accept our losses.  Only in learning from our downfalls can we focus on our strengths and implement proper strategies in the places where we can truly make impact.  Our model can’t fit everywhere, so instead, we have to make our model fit where it can, and it’s in those spaces where we can and must succeed.