Open Field

Open Field changes the lives and futures of youth through the game of soccer by promoting four of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): (3) Health, (4) Education, (5) Gender equity; (8) Employment.

Open Field's framework for educational soccer-based activities promotes health, education, civic engagement, and leadership skill-building in youth ages 6-18. The model is effective because it empowers teenagers and young adults from within the target community to play a key role in affecting change in their neighborhood, engaging them in key leadership roles and providing training and resources to build their capacity as role models and peer educators. The peer educator approach is a widely-accepted, proven-effective tool in promoting healthy behaviors among adolescents in the global health sector. A peer, as we refer to the term, not only considers age, but also ethnic/racial background and shared experience.

Our programming provides hundreds of hours of leadership experiences for participants including mentoring, peer education, governance, and community service. Community leaders gain personal and professional skills, on-the-job training and management experience, and access to future employment. All participants learn about vital health and social issues integrated into the soccer activities.

The long-term goal is to develop a model for grassroots, educational soccer programs that can replicate and scale to reach youth across the world.

Typical Sport for Good (specifically soccer-focused) initiatives that target low-income communities often utilize adult leaders/instructors from outside the community. As a result, youth do not engage and learn from coaches, mentors and role models who look like them and have a similar experience and background. Often, youth who want to participate in these programs must travel outside their community. Our approach builds the capacity of representatives of the neighborhood to take leadership positions and utilizes space within the community to improve the quality of place.

Our approach is youth-led, and neighborhood-based. This approach is guided by two very essential concepts that contribute to our success: removing adults from the typical decision-making roles and replacing them with youth who know better what their peers need and removing the barrier of transportation, which discourages many youth from participating in a lot of extracurricular activities.

We create safe spaces for youth to play and learn, with an educational topic connected to every practice and game. Youth participants take on leadership roles as coaches, referees, and mentors to their peers. Youth participants emerge from our programs with new skills to succeed in school and in the work force. Our model provides transforming experiences and transferable skills to youth through sport.

Youth experience:
• Leadership roles as referees and match delegates
• Mentoring relationships as coaches and team captains
• Integrity and respect as key elements of all competitions
• Part-time jobs in their community

Youth learn:
• Communication
• Teamwork
• Conflict resolution
• Personal responsibility

Our approach to Sport for Good is informed by Open Field's decade of experience working in Sport for Good in Cameroon, Africa. Sport for Good, also known as ‘sport for development and peace’ or ‘sport-based youth development’, is a theory and practice for youth engagement and community development that leverages the passion and character-building attributes inherent in sport to create positive outcomes in the lives of participants far beyond the playing surface. A successful Sport for Good initiative is intentional in the design and implementation of activities to go above and beyond traditional sport instruction.

Since 2010, Open Field’s global team has engaged more than 5,000 youth in educational soccer programming, mentoring relationships, travel abroad experiences, and cultural exchange in Cameroon, Africa and now Pittsburgh, PA. We've hosted 30 educational competitions and community events, sent a select boys U-15 team from Cameroon to compete in an international competition for youth soccer teams in Bulgaria in 2018, and supported one youth participant from Cameroon to attend college and play soccer in the U.S.

Once launching activities in Pittsburgh, Open Field partnered with several youth-serving and cultural organizations to reach youth from immigrant, refugee, and minority communities in the city. Since launching Programs in Pittsburgh, Open Field partnered with the Somali Bantu Community Association of Pittsburgh and Youth Places to launch our CHAMPS youth leadership program in Northview Heights for Black African and American-born children and teamed up with JFCS Pittsburgh and Alliance for Refugee Youth Support and Education (ARYSE) to run programming for newly resettled refugee youth in Crafton Heights. In 2020, we shifted our programs virtual to reach more youth through collaboration with the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh and Casa San Jose and launched our first Girls Program. In 2021, we facilitated programming for more than 450 youth across Allgheny County with seven partners.

Despite the instability in Cameroon since late 2016, leaving millions of children without access to proper schooling, one thing that has been a constant: our presence on neighborhood soccer fields and in the lives of our youth. Overcoming chaos in the country, and with support from the United Nations Development Programme, our staff engage more than 1,000 youth in health, education and leadership skill-building activities in 12 different neighborhoods in three cities in Cameroon. In 2019, our first year running programming in Pittsburgh, we have engaged over 150 youth, primarily immigrant and refugees living in low-resources neighborhoods, in positive, healthy sport-based activities with caring adult and teenager role models and provided summer employment to eight teenagers using the same model developed in Cameroon.

Here’s what that looks like, by the numbers:

More than 1,000 youth engaged in 2 countries (soon to be 4 countries in 2022)
20+ community events this past year
nearly 100 girls engaged in Girls Leadership Initiative and empowerment programming
2-3 educational soccer sessions per week in each community
50+ teenagers serving as peer educators, trained and active as role models