Wow - this is great - it seems like you've done a significant amount of work to gather together the appropriate stakeholders to carry out this project.
A lot of other organizations are likely in similar positions to when you first started out and could benefit from your experience. Can you describe how you determined your site selection and why you limit participation to 400? In a highly populated country, how do you determine which girls can participate? Is it merit based?
Site selection can be a sensitive and challenging process as there are many stakeholders and social, religious and cultural variables that must carefully be taken into consideration. In both Delhi and Mumbai, Naz made connections with existing NGOs in the cities we are active have launched in to form local partnership. These local partners are not necessarily focused on girls’ empowerment or sport, but have access to large numbers of vulnerable youth (particularly girls) as well as existing trust from the community. We offer GOAL to these NGOs to complement – not replace – existing programmes. By affiliating ourselves with these partners, parents and community leaders are much more likely to trust us to deliver programmes to their girls and allow them to participate. They confer an existing legitimacy on us so that when we do approach the community to recruit girls, we have a lot more success.
We also use a set of criteria that we have in a brief “selection matrix” to determine the appropriateness of a partner. The partner organisations must have access to the community as a result of interventions (direct or peer organisations/institutions) as well as access to a potentially large number of young women. We look that there is reasonable area to set up the netball courts and conduct training sessions, or that there exists the potential to gain access to that space. They generally serve communities within 10 to 15km of their offices; the population in these communities range from 15,000 -30,000 with predominantly daily wage earners bringing in typically, less than $2 per day.
And of course, relationships come into play significantly – the willingness of the nonprofit to support GOAL and work closely with us, as well as their experience and reputation are important. We’ve found one partner that has access to in-school girls and one with access to out-of-school girls in each city: In Delhi we work with Deepalaya schools as well as Prerana. In Mumbai our partners are Meljol and Hamara Club.
With regard to our reach and participation, 400 is not a limit but rather the extent of our capacity right now. Fundamentally we like to keep each “cohort” small (less than 30 girls) which keeps the group large enough to start a team, but small enough to feel comfortable talking about some of the sensitive issues we cover in our education sessions. So we are limited by the number of staff and Champions that can run sessions.
We have a target to scale up to 1,000 girls per city in 2010 by expanding our Champions (train the trainer) programme. Once a site has been selected with the local partner, we invite all girls at that site to participate and try to accommodate them all. At some larger sites, we are exploring options to run concurrent sessions or have two sets of girls pass through a year. However these are issues we are dealing with as we write this!
I wonder if you think your project is easily adaptable to other realities/countries.
Have you faced barriers to have girls participating in the activities? What do the families of the girls think about their participation?
I would like to invite you to join the Women Win group.
Women Win is the first ever international women’s fund that supports sport and physical activities as instruments for social change and women’s empowerment.
Women Win will use the competition to find a fellow between the ages of 15 and 65 years old that positively change the lives of women and girls in their community through sports.
As far as adaptability goes, this is something we are focusing on this year. Part of that is building a toolkit that will document all the learnings from running GOAL in India to make it applicable to other countries. We also feel the education modules we've developed are flexible enough that they can be tailored to specific situations. We're very excited about the possibility of running GOAL elswhere in the future, hopefully by 2010.
Initially, there can be skepticism when GOAL launches in a new site. There are a lot of careful meetings that happen - with the local NGO partner as a broker, we do have to convince parents and community leaders to let girls participate. We often hold a mela or large community event with an exhibition game to introduce families to GOAL and netball and assuage some of their fears (e.g., that girls can play in fairly conservative clothing, etc.).
The feedback from parents after the pilot of GOAL was extremely positive - mothers and fathers were so happy with the results. Here's what a few of our programme participants in Delhi told us:
"Before the programme my mother used to make me do so much of the work, that you can’t imagine, but now she says that, forget work, go play."
"Our mother says 'I could never study, I never got the opportunity, but I don’t want that to happen with you, I want you to go on in life and make it big.'"
"Now they have a lot of hopes and aspirations for me, and they think that I will do something in life, and I’ll earn a good name to the family."
We would be very keen to speak to you more about the programme, please let us know if you'd like to follow up further.
As far as adaptability goes, this is something we are focusing on this year. Part of that is building a toolkit that will document all the learnings from running GOAL in India to make it applicable to other countries. We also feel the education modules we've developed are flexible enough that they can be tailored to specific situations. We're very excited about the possibility of running GOAL elswhere in the future, hopefully by 2010.
Initially, there can be skepticism when GOAL launches in a new site. There are a lot of careful meetings that happen - with the local NGO partner as a broker, we do have to convince parents and community leaders to let girls participate. We often hold a mela or large community event with an exhibition game to introduce families to GOAL and netball and assuage some of their fears (e.g., that girls can play in fairly conservative clothing, etc.).
The feedback from parents after the pilot of GOAL was extremely positive - mothers and fathers were so happy with the results. Here's what a few of our programme participants in Delhi told us:
"Before the programme my mother used to make me do so much of the work, that you can’t imagine, but now she says that, forget work, go play."
"Our mother says 'I could never study, I never got the opportunity, but I don’t want that to happen with you, I want you to go on in life and make it big.'"
"Now they have a lot of hopes and aspirations for me, and they think that I will do something in life, and I’ll earn a good name to the family."
We would be very keen to speak to you more about the programme, please let us know if you'd like to follow up further.
The Goal Programme is unique in that it introduces sports to girls in India, a country where there are very few female sports role models and girls and women are not actively encouraged to participate in sporting activities.
It has life changing effects on the girls who participate and hopefully it will go from strength to strenghth.
Netball is an easy team game to play, it cheap, fun and helps develop core skills of agility, balance and ball control.
Netball is proven as a sport which has specific appeal to women and girls and empowers all who play or become involved in it.
If anyone reading this is interested in netball please do not hesitate to contact me.
Wishing Goal continued success for 2009 and many more years to come.
Site selection can be a sensitive and challenging process as there are many stakeholders and social, religious and cultural variables that must carefully be taken into consideration. In both Delhi and Mumbai, Naz made connections with existing NGOs in the cities we are active have launched in to form local partnership. These local partners are not necessarily focused on girls’ empowerment or sport, but have access to large numbers of vulnerable youth (particularly girls) as well as existing trust from the community. We offer GOAL to these NGOs to complement – not replace – existing programmes. By affiliating ourselves with these partners, parents and community leaders are much more likely to trust us to deliver programmes to their girls and allow them to participate. They confer an existing legitimacy on us so that when we do approach the community to recruit girls, we have a lot more success.
We also use a set of criteria that we have in a brief “selection matrix” to determine the appropriateness of a partner. The partner organisations must have access to the community as a result of interventions (direct or peer organisations/institutions) as well as access to a potentially large number of young women. We look that there is reasonable area to set up the netball courts and conduct training sessions, or that there exists the potential to gain access to that space. They generally serve communities within 10 to 15km of their offices; the population in these communities range from 15,000 -30,000 with predominantly daily wage earners bringing in typically, less than $2 per day.
And of course, relationships come into play significantly – the willingness of the nonprofit to support GOAL and work closely with us, as well as their experience and reputation are important. We’ve found one partner that has access to in-school girls and one with access to out-of-school girls in each city: In Delhi we work with Deepalaya schools as well as Prerana. In Mumbai our partners are Meljol and Hamara Club.
With regard to our reach and participation, 400 is not a limit but rather the extent of our capacity right now. Fundamentally we like to keep each “cohort” small (less than 30 girls) which keeps the group large enough to start a team, but small enough to feel comfortable talking about some of the sensitive issues we cover in our education sessions. So we are limited by the number of staff and Champions that can run sessions.
We have a target to scale up to 1,000 girls per city in 2010 by expanding our Champions (train the trainer) programme. Once a site has been selected with the local partner, we invite all girls at that site to participate and try to accommodate them all. At some larger sites, we are exploring options to run concurrent sessions or have two sets of girls pass through a year. However these are issues we are dealing with as we write this!
Comments
Dear GOAL India,
Wow - this is great - it seems like you've done a significant amount of work to gather together the appropriate stakeholders to carry out this project.
A lot of other organizations are likely in similar positions to when you first started out and could benefit from your experience. Can you describe how you determined your site selection and why you limit participation to 400? In a highly populated country, how do you determine which girls can participate? Is it merit based?
Thanks for entering,
Stephani
Nike
Site selection can be a sensitive and challenging process as there are many stakeholders and social, religious and cultural variables that must carefully be taken into consideration. In both Delhi and Mumbai, Naz made connections with existing NGOs in the cities we are active have launched in to form local partnership. These local partners are not necessarily focused on girls’ empowerment or sport, but have access to large numbers of vulnerable youth (particularly girls) as well as existing trust from the community. We offer GOAL to these NGOs to complement – not replace – existing programmes. By affiliating ourselves with these partners, parents and community leaders are much more likely to trust us to deliver programmes to their girls and allow them to participate. They confer an existing legitimacy on us so that when we do approach the community to recruit girls, we have a lot more success.
We also use a set of criteria that we have in a brief “selection matrix” to determine the appropriateness of a partner. The partner organisations must have access to the community as a result of interventions (direct or peer organisations/institutions) as well as access to a potentially large number of young women. We look that there is reasonable area to set up the netball courts and conduct training sessions, or that there exists the potential to gain access to that space. They generally serve communities within 10 to 15km of their offices; the population in these communities range from 15,000 -30,000 with predominantly daily wage earners bringing in typically, less than $2 per day.
And of course, relationships come into play significantly – the willingness of the nonprofit to support GOAL and work closely with us, as well as their experience and reputation are important. We’ve found one partner that has access to in-school girls and one with access to out-of-school girls in each city: In Delhi we work with Deepalaya schools as well as Prerana. In Mumbai our partners are Meljol and Hamara Club.
With regard to our reach and participation, 400 is not a limit but rather the extent of our capacity right now. Fundamentally we like to keep each “cohort” small (less than 30 girls) which keeps the group large enough to start a team, but small enough to feel comfortable talking about some of the sensitive issues we cover in our education sessions. So we are limited by the number of staff and Champions that can run sessions.
We have a target to scale up to 1,000 girls per city in 2010 by expanding our Champions (train the trainer) programme. Once a site has been selected with the local partner, we invite all girls at that site to participate and try to accommodate them all. At some larger sites, we are exploring options to run concurrent sessions or have two sets of girls pass through a year. However these are issues we are dealing with as we write this!
Hello!
Congratulate on your entry.
I wonder if you think your project is easily adaptable to other realities/countries.
Have you faced barriers to have girls participating in the activities? What do the families of the girls think about their participation?
I would like to invite you to join the Women Win group.
Women Win is the first ever international women’s fund that supports sport and physical activities as instruments for social change and women’s empowerment.
Women Win will use the competition to find a fellow between the ages of 15 and 65 years old that positively change the lives of women and girls in their community through sports.
Please go to this link http://sportforchange.changemakers.com/en-us/group/womenwin and click in join the group. After becoming a member, leave your coments and participate in our topics debate by clicking in topics being discussed.
Wish you all the best luck!
Hi Renata,
Thanks for your comments!
As far as adaptability goes, this is something we are focusing on this year. Part of that is building a toolkit that will document all the learnings from running GOAL in India to make it applicable to other countries. We also feel the education modules we've developed are flexible enough that they can be tailored to specific situations. We're very excited about the possibility of running GOAL elswhere in the future, hopefully by 2010.
Initially, there can be skepticism when GOAL launches in a new site. There are a lot of careful meetings that happen - with the local NGO partner as a broker, we do have to convince parents and community leaders to let girls participate. We often hold a mela or large community event with an exhibition game to introduce families to GOAL and netball and assuage some of their fears (e.g., that girls can play in fairly conservative clothing, etc.).
The feedback from parents after the pilot of GOAL was extremely positive - mothers and fathers were so happy with the results. Here's what a few of our programme participants in Delhi told us:
"Before the programme my mother used to make me do so much of the work, that you can’t imagine, but now she says that, forget work, go play."
"Our mother says 'I could never study, I never got the opportunity, but I don’t want that to happen with you, I want you to go on in life and make it big.'"
"Now they have a lot of hopes and aspirations for me, and they think that I will do something in life, and I’ll earn a good name to the family."
We would be very keen to speak to you more about the programme, please let us know if you'd like to follow up further.
Hi Renata,
Thanks for your comments!
As far as adaptability goes, this is something we are focusing on this year. Part of that is building a toolkit that will document all the learnings from running GOAL in India to make it applicable to other countries. We also feel the education modules we've developed are flexible enough that they can be tailored to specific situations. We're very excited about the possibility of running GOAL elswhere in the future, hopefully by 2010.
Initially, there can be skepticism when GOAL launches in a new site. There are a lot of careful meetings that happen - with the local NGO partner as a broker, we do have to convince parents and community leaders to let girls participate. We often hold a mela or large community event with an exhibition game to introduce families to GOAL and netball and assuage some of their fears (e.g., that girls can play in fairly conservative clothing, etc.).
The feedback from parents after the pilot of GOAL was extremely positive - mothers and fathers were so happy with the results. Here's what a few of our programme participants in Delhi told us:
"Before the programme my mother used to make me do so much of the work, that you can’t imagine, but now she says that, forget work, go play."
"Our mother says 'I could never study, I never got the opportunity, but I don’t want that to happen with you, I want you to go on in life and make it big.'"
"Now they have a lot of hopes and aspirations for me, and they think that I will do something in life, and I’ll earn a good name to the family."
We would be very keen to speak to you more about the programme, please let us know if you'd like to follow up further.
The Goal Programme is unique in that it introduces sports to girls in India, a country where there are very few female sports role models and girls and women are not actively encouraged to participate in sporting activities.
It has life changing effects on the girls who participate and hopefully it will go from strength to strenghth.
Netball is an easy team game to play, it cheap, fun and helps develop core skills of agility, balance and ball control.
Netball is proven as a sport which has specific appeal to women and girls and empowers all who play or become involved in it.
If anyone reading this is interested in netball please do not hesitate to contact me.
Wishing Goal continued success for 2009 and many more years to come.
Urvasi
Thanks for your comment Stephani!
Site selection can be a sensitive and challenging process as there are many stakeholders and social, religious and cultural variables that must carefully be taken into consideration. In both Delhi and Mumbai, Naz made connections with existing NGOs in the cities we are active have launched in to form local partnership. These local partners are not necessarily focused on girls’ empowerment or sport, but have access to large numbers of vulnerable youth (particularly girls) as well as existing trust from the community. We offer GOAL to these NGOs to complement – not replace – existing programmes. By affiliating ourselves with these partners, parents and community leaders are much more likely to trust us to deliver programmes to their girls and allow them to participate. They confer an existing legitimacy on us so that when we do approach the community to recruit girls, we have a lot more success.
We also use a set of criteria that we have in a brief “selection matrix” to determine the appropriateness of a partner. The partner organisations must have access to the community as a result of interventions (direct or peer organisations/institutions) as well as access to a potentially large number of young women. We look that there is reasonable area to set up the netball courts and conduct training sessions, or that there exists the potential to gain access to that space. They generally serve communities within 10 to 15km of their offices; the population in these communities range from 15,000 -30,000 with predominantly daily wage earners bringing in typically, less than $2 per day.
And of course, relationships come into play significantly – the willingness of the nonprofit to support GOAL and work closely with us, as well as their experience and reputation are important. We’ve found one partner that has access to in-school girls and one with access to out-of-school girls in each city: In Delhi we work with Deepalaya schools as well as Prerana. In Mumbai our partners are Meljol and Hamara Club.
With regard to our reach and participation, 400 is not a limit but rather the extent of our capacity right now. Fundamentally we like to keep each “cohort” small (less than 30 girls) which keeps the group large enough to start a team, but small enough to feel comfortable talking about some of the sensitive issues we cover in our education sessions. So we are limited by the number of staff and Champions that can run sessions.
We have a target to scale up to 1,000 girls per city in 2010 by expanding our Champions (train the trainer) programme. Once a site has been selected with the local partner, we invite all girls at that site to participate and try to accommodate them all. At some larger sites, we are exploring options to run concurrent sessions or have two sets of girls pass through a year. However these are issues we are dealing with as we write this!
We have a new blog! Visit us at www.goalgirlsindia.com
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