Carolina for Kibera is Changing the Game
bringing youth from the battle field to the soccer field in Kibera, Kenya
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Sport
Soccer
Year the initative began (yyyy)
2001
YouTube Upload
Project URL (include HTTP://)
http://cfk.unc.edu
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Few effective tools for personal improvement
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Social cohesion
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic:
This field has not been completed
Name Your Project
Describe Your Idea
What is your signature innovation, your new idea, in one sentence?
By participating in a grassroots soccer program, youth in the Kibera slum learn ethnic and religious cooperation and other leadership and lifeskills.
Describe your innovation. What makes your idea unique and different than others doing work in the field?
Carolina for Kibera's grassroots participatory model is innovative because it utilizes Kibera’s characteristic diversity and large youth population as tools for combating ethnic and religious-based violence. CFK promotes cooperation and comradery between youth of different ethnic groups in Kibera through organized soccer competition and community service activities. Ultimately, the model takes the same factors that traditionally cause violence in Kibera (a large, diverse, largely unemployed youth population) and puts them on a different playing field. By changing how and what game the youth play, CFK leads a new approach to ethnic cooperation and community development. CFK’s unique approach is holistic. While focused on promoting ethnic and religious cooperation, CFK takes advantage of the opportunity to also foster youth leadership, gender inclusion, and HIV/AIDS awareness through off-the-field skills trainings, peer education and outreach, and an all-girls soccer tournament.
What are the existing barriers, the biggest problem, your innovation is hoping to address/change?
Many of the world’s most challenging disputes stem from local ethnic or religious conflict. In the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya – East Africa’s largest slum - a violent history of ethnic violence is exacerbated by poverty, overpopulation, and unemployment. What is more, youth aged 15 to 30 are the main combatants when Kibera’s six different ethnic and religious groups clash. CFK’s sports program curbs ethno-religious tension by engaging and investing in youth who might otherwise be fighting.
Delivery Model: How do you implement your innovation and apply it to the challenge/problem you are addressing?
The thousands of boys and girls that play in CFK soccer tournaments in Kibera must practice and compete on ethnically diverse teams. Tournaments are four to six months long and may include hundreds of matches leading up to the championship games. Team coaches and game referees are older youth volunteers from Kibera who serve as role models for the players. Coaches and referees enforce the CFK Fair Play Code, governing player behavior on and off the field. CFK is rooted in the conviction that everything must be earned because nothing in life is free. CFK players, in exchange for the opportunity to play soccer, must also participate in community service projects. Teams with high rates of community service participation earn extra points and advance higher in tournament rankings. Off the field, CFK offers skills trainings that increase employment opportunities for players. Also, CFK utilizes peer education methodology to encourage players to make educated health-related decisions.
How do you plan to grow your innovation?
CFK already serves as a model for other community-based organizations in difficult, disenfranchised, and often dangerous places worldwide. For example, CFK Youth Sports Program Officer Abdul “Cantar” Hussein traveled to the Gambia in 2007 to advise a nascent organization interested in applying CFK’s sports model to its own program. Cantar trained his colleagues on mobilization skills, community involvement, operational structure, coaching, tournament organization, and gender equality. CFK plans to continue its work as a model by developing best practices in the field in order to share knowledge, challenges, and successes on a larger scale. CFK also seeks to expand its presence by involving youth in the United States in awareness campaigns, fundraising, and soccer equipment drives. After a recent cover article featuring CFK in TIME for Kids magazine, CFK has worked with youth soccer teams, Girl Scout troops, and classrooms in the US to raise awareness and support their peers in Kibera.
Provide one sentence describing your impact/intended impact.
By providing opportunties to youth for personal development and positive interaction with youth of other religions and ethnicities, we can prevent youth participation in violence.
What impact has your innovation had to date/or what is your intended impact? Exactly who are the beneficiaries?
Sources estimate Kibera’s population to be between 700,000 and 1 million residents. In each case of collective violence in Kibera, the combatants were predominately unemployed youth aged 16 to 30. CFK offers a venue where youth in Kibera develop critical team-building, cooperative, and leadership skills, which are necessary for developing a socially-minded and cohesive youth population, as well as lowering the incidence of violence. Because Kibera youth are responsible for programmatic decision-making, the organizational structure creates stakeholders and role models in the community and provides youth with an opportunity to excel at sports as an alternative to violence. CFK gives these unemployed youth, as well as their young brothers and sisters, opportunities to develop life skills for individual success, as well as community betterment. Over the long-term, CFK supports emerging leaders who will one day become effective agents for change in Kibera, Africa, and indeed, the world.
How many people have you served directly?
Membership in CFK’s youth sports program grew by over 25% since 2003. Carolina for Kibera has reached over 5000 boys and girls in Kibera through its soccer tournaments. community service projects, HIV/AIDS peer education program, and skills-trainings since its inception in 2001. In November 2007, 3000 youth will participate in the CFK tournament, including 1600 youth under the age of twelve. Participation in CFK-sponsored community clean-ups and other service projects is consistently between 500 and 700 youth. The clean-ups are held, on average, twice a month in one of Kibera’s eleven villages. Kibera residents (over 100,000 in some villages) benefit directly from having CFK players and other volunteers literally use rakes, shovels, and wheelbarrows to remove trash and solid waste from the community that would otherwise clog man-made ditches and contaminate water sources.
How many people have you served indirectly?
Indirectly, Carolina for Kibera serves, or has the potential to serve, the entire Kibera community of nearly 1 million people. CFK has expanded its reach greatly through word-of-mouth within Kibera. This mainly occurs when family and friends of young CFK soccer players have the opportunity to learn from the players and become involved in future tournaments and community clean-ups. CFK players can also teach their peers not participating in CFK about leadership, HIV/AIDS, and ethnic cooperation. Additionally, by engaging youth in Kibera in sport, community service and leadership development, Carolina for Kibera serves the entire community of Kibera by reducing the potential for religious and ethnic violence in the slum. Consequently, not only do CFK’s activities improve the lives of the youth players, but also do the lives of Kibera residents improve generally.
Please list any other measures reflective of the impact of your innovation?
31 youth trained in computer literacy skills; participation in community service projects is consistently between 500-700 players; CFK is 1 of 7 programs worldwide identified as an example “of innovation and…effective work” in HIV Prevention with Especially Vulnerable Young People (Univ. of London); only grassroots organization invited to participate in 2006 Brookings-Blum Roundtable on “Poverty and Insecurity” at the Aspen Institute; over 2,000 tons of trash cleared from Kibera by CFK in 2006.
What are the main barriers to creating or achieving your impact?
Demand within Kibera for CFK’s soccer and youth leadership programs is growing precipitously and often surpasses the human and material resources available at any given moment. In order to achieve the target impact, CFK must keep financial growth paced with programmatic demand, and maintain an office staff that can also accommodate the growth. CFK staff and volunteers work extraordinarily hard and are motivated by passion and belief in the CFK sports and youth leadership model.
Issue Selector
How is your initiative financed (or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)?
CFK is funded by diverse group of private foundations, charitable corporations and individual donors. After a $30,000 start-up grant in 2001, the Ford Foundation’s support grew to a multi-year grant of $120,000 through 2008. Other supporters include American Jewish World Service, Omidyar Foundation, William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust, and Robertson Foundation. CFK is establishing an endowment fund that is managed by the University of North Carolina (UNC). Sports equipment is donated by the U.S. Soccer Foundation’s Passback program (administered by Sports Endeavors in Hillsborough, NC), as well as Nike and Adidas. Institutional support, including office space and fundraising resources, is provided by UNC’s Center for Global Initiatives.
If known, provide information on your finances and organization.
2007 Annual Budget for CFK Youth Sports Program: $60,000 2007 Total Annual Budget for Carolina for Kibera (all programs): $250,000 2006 Annual Revenue for all Carolina for Kibera Programs: $333,317 (including restricted, unrestricted, and interest income) CFK Youth Sports Program Staff Full-Time: 1 (Youth Sports Program Officer) Part-Time: 0 Volunteer: 250+ (coaches and referees) Carolina for Kibera (CFK) Staff (all programs) Full-Time: 22 Part-Time: 1 Volunteer: 300+
What is the potential demand for your innovation?
The demand for CFK’s innovative model is both local and global. CFK has the potential to become the go-to sports program for nearly half a million young people in Kibera. CFK works with local organizations to strengthen their sports programs in other marginalized communities. Globally, the demand for CFK’s model is already emerging. CFK receives several inquiries monthly from community-based organizations worldwide interested in implementing the CFK grassroots sports and youth leadership model.
What are the main barriers to financial sustainability?
Donor fatigue is perhaps the largest barrier to financial sustainability for CFK, although we are constantly searching for and implementing new ways to engage with our supporters. Also, because the focus in Kibera is programming and efforts in the U.S. are almost exclusively all-volunteer, CFK simply lacks the person-hours to invest in development and marketing that larger non-profits enjoy. We believe that an endowment will improve financial sustainability and programmatic flexibility.
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story.
While an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, Rye Barcott lived in Kibera and studied youth involvement in ethnic and religious conflict as a Burch Fellow in 2001. During his studies, Barcott met Salim Mohamed, who was head of the Information and Management Department of the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) in another Nairobi slum. Through conversations about Barcott’s studies in Kibera and Mohamed’s work in Mathare, the two decided they could adapt the MYSA model to Kibera. Effectively, Barcott and Mohamed created a holistic sports model unique to Carolina for Kibera geared towards ethnic and religious cooperation. Barcott and Mohamed also reunited with the late Tabitha Festo, who had established CFK’s second program, the Tabitha Medical Clinic, with a $26 grant from Barcott. CFK received initial funding in the form of a $30,000 start-up grant from the Ford Foundation. A year later, two undergraduates from the US, Karen Austrian and Emily Verellen, helped young women in Kibera create The Binti Pamoja (Daughters United) Center, establishing a safe space for young girls to address issues unique to them. Youth in Kibera subsequently developed the Taka ni Pato (Trash is Cash) program in 2005 in order to address the dual problems of unemployment and solid waste management. Each program is led by residents of Kibera, keeping in step with CFK’s belief that solutions to challenges involving poverty are possible only if those affected by it drive development.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material.
Rye Barcott graduated with a B.A. in Peace, War, and Defense from the University of North Carolina. Rye served in the U.S. Marine Corps for five years and is currently pursuing a joint degree from Harvard Business School and Kennedy School of Government. Salim Mohamed grew up in a Kenyan children’s home and got his start in sports development with the Mathare Youth Sports Association. Salim was a 2007 TED Global Conference Fellow and presenter at the International AIDS Conference in Thailand.
How did you hear about this contest and what is your main incentive to participate? (this is confidential)
Carolina for Kibera learned about this contest through initial research on the internet, and then we were directed to the pre-registration by a friend familiar with Ashoka. Later, we were encouraged to apply by employees of GlobalGiving, Ashoka, Nike and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who are familiar with our work in Kibera and with the Changemakers competition. CFK chose to enter this contest not only because we feel our model for using sport to promote ethno-religious cooperation is innovative, but also because we are interested in learning more about our fellow entrants doing work in the field and hope to receive constructive criticism relating to our work that will facilitate growth and programmatic improvement.
Affiliation (please list all that apply)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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