SOCCER WITHOUT BORDERS

Soccer Without Borders aims to build a more inclusive world through soccer. As a direct, youth-serving organization, we are working toward this goal through kid-first, trauma-informed youth development programs that build meaningful connections between individuals, peers, and the community. By focusing our efforts on marginalized populations, particularly newcomer refugee and immigrant youth and adolescent girls, our programs break barriers and build new pathways for youth to reach their inherent potential.

We currently operate across 5 U.S. cities and 3 countries, but the need for expanded programming is insatiable. We receive requests daily for new program sites. As a result, we have two middle-term goals:
1. We are working to grow the number of Soccer Without Borders USA year-round program cities from 4 (2016) to 8 before 2026. SWB Seattle was the first of this expansion plan.
2. We are working to maximize our impact in the cities where we already work through a hub-and-spoke model. SWB Oakland, Nicaragua, and Baltimore are already implementing new satellite/spoke models and we have plans to use this approach at all sites.
3. We are working to package, test, and share our most effective practices so that other program practitioners can apply these within their own organizations. One of the most promising practices among these is Women's Sports Corps, a joint venture with Women Win that matches female athlete coaches to community organizations that aim to build their girls' participation. Another promising practice is our English language development program for newcomer refugee and immigrant youth. This program component provides training to coaches on how to create an inclusive cross-cultural environment, tailor their sessions to maximize speaking and listening time, and an activity bank of soccer drills and games redesigned for English language learning. These tools and training, once evaluated and refined, have the potential to benefit gym teachers and sport coaches across the country.
4. We are working to expand our bridge-building efforts to better link program participants to their surrounding communities and create meaningful interactions and understanding across cultures, religion, nationalities, and languages.

After 10 years of programming and thousands of conversations with community members, coaches, leaders, youth, and parents, SWB operationalized its institutional knowledge to create the "SWB Program Rubric." The Rubric serves as a roadmap to build sustainable, effective, locally-relevant programs. With specific targets across 16 different categories from program culture, to team-building, to accounting, to participants, and more, each program's strengths and challenges are clearly identified and addressed. Each category is matched to a toolkit, providing best practices and concrete resources for program directors. Programs are assessed relative to the targets annually, and provided a comprehensive “from-to" plan highlighting the areas of need and of opportunity.

By providing a clear roadmap for progress, and relevant, specific tools, SWB leaders are motivated and supported to build programs with confidence and quality. Moreover, they have a platform to share their lessons learned with their peers, and innovate for the whole.

Above all, trained and committed leadership is crucial to delivering quality programming that positively impacts youth. Year to year, we have had as high as 97% retention of head coaches. The average SWB head coach has a tenure of 3.5 years, and it is this consistency that allows us to form strong bonds and build trust with participants, share best practices across programs, and collaborate to refine our program model.

The collective expertise of SWB's organizational and program leaders is tremendous on the field and off. At the board level, SWB is governed and advised by a range of leaders with expertise in youth development, philanthropy, consulting, program service delivery, health, and soccer, each with their own meaningful connection to our work. In our leadership, all Directors have significant international program delivery experience in East Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Eight of our head coaches are former participants, hailing from the very communities we aim to serve. Half of our coaching staff across SWB are women, a rare statistic on the soccer field globally.

The combination of international experience, technical skill-building, academic credentials, and learned lessons through SWB has enabled us to not only build effective, impactful programs, but to gain outside recognition for our work. In 2017, SWB was named the only recipient of the FIFA Diversity Award. Earlier that year, the US Soccer Foundation awarded SWB its Impact Award, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation named SWB a finalist for its Sport Award. In 2016, the Wharton School of Business selected Soccer Without Borders for its $250,000 Lipman Family Prize for Social Impact and Innovation. SWB has worked with the U.S. Department of State in Egypt, Guatemala, Nepal, and Nicaragua to implement coaches trainings and promote cross-cultural understanding, and continues to receive invitations to present our work at conferences, panels, and in universities around the world.

Scaling solutions that work is no small task. Soccer Without Borders is at a unique stage in our history, with growing evidence that our model can achieve meaningful positive change for youth, but a need to create efficiencies of scale if we intend to grow. We have been working with experts in the field and leveraging our internal expertise to address challenges of scale, and will continue to work toward these goals.

Our program model specifically focuses on five outcome areas: Social capital, Healthy lifestyles, Academic advancement, Language development, Personal development. We believe strongly in a process-oriented approach to impact measurement (see: http://huff.to/2ngdnRa).

As our participants move through middle school and into high school, they have more freedom to choose what to do with their time. Youth choose to remain a part of SWB through high school graduation because- as they would tell you- it is more like family than a “program."

We use and develop innovative tools that help us improve and iterate our process, respond to feedback, and capture outcomes:
1. Outputs: We track participation through the UpActive mobile app and UpMetrics, analyzing trends and comparing results against four participation categories: all-star, regular, at-risk, and drop-in. With activities 3-5 days/week, more than 30 weeks/year, regular participation amounts to CDC recommended levels of moderate-to-vigorous activity for 60%+ of the year.

2. Coach Quality: Our FAMILY (Facilitation, Activity, Management, Identity, Language, and Youth-Centered) Framework details 43 specific, observable coach actions to create an inclusive, skill-building environment. We evaluate this through daily coach self-assessments and monthly peer observations. Our average head coach tenure is more than 3 years.

3. Youth Survey: We conduct an annual student survey using an externally validated survey on the High Impact Attributes, soliciting additional program feedback.

4. Outcomes: We track relevant external data such as school grades, attendance, graduation rates, and college matriculation. To date, regular and all-star participants have graduated high school at a rate of 95% (compare to a national graduation rate of 60% for English language learners).

Some additional key results include:
Academic Advancement: A Palo Alto University study concluded that SWB Oakland participants demonstrate fewer school absences, and increased social self-efficacy than their non-program peers at the same school. 90% college matriculation rate for veteran programs

Social Capital: Overall ratio of 10:1 Trained Coach to Participant Ratio, which increases mentoring relationships. 93% of youth reported that they trust their coach, 93% reported they feel safe at SWB, 94% reported that they made a new friend from a different culture.

Language Development: 99% of SWB USA participants are English language learners. SWB youth hone their English skills for 10-12 additional hours per week in a variety of different contexts with their teams. 91% of youth reported feeling comfortable practicing English at SWB.

Healthy Lifestyles: 43% of our participants are girls, nearly all playing on their first-ever sports team. 80% Participant Retention Rate across all programs, with higher rates in certain programs (one quarter of our participants have been in SWB programming for 3 or more years).