DEVELOPING COMMUNITIES THROUGH SPORT

FOREWORD

The Laureus Sport for Good Foundation is based on a simple but powerful concept that sport can make a real difference. The Laureus Academy is a body of 46 sporting legends that have achieved amazing individual feats in their fields, overcoming numerous obstacles along the way. Around the world young people are facing increasingly overwhelming challenges and the Laureus Academy believes that sport has a key role in addressing issues and providing solutions.

Throughout my sporting career I have been driven and inspired to succeed. As a paralympian I have had the pleasure of competing against the best athletes in the world. Sport has shaped who I am, how I behave, and every aspect of how I approach life’s challenges. As a vice-chairman of the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation I have had the privilege of witnessing the power of sport in many communities. From conflict resolution in Jerusalem, to gender and disability understanding in Rwanda, sport has not only provided the impetus to engage young people but it has been the mechanism for understanding and education, through which communities are strengthened and empowered. Urban Stars embodies the vision of Laureus by working with young people at risk of gang culture and antisocial activity, directing energies in a positive way and providing on-going opportunities for individuals to better themselves and their communities. It is here where accredited qualifications resulting from the programme are so important. I would like to wish all those who take part in Urban Stars the very best of luck and convey the support of the whole Laureus World Sports Academy in their endeavours.

DAME TANNI GREY-THOMPSONVice ChairmanLaureus sport for good foundation

Active Communities Network and London Active Communities are excited by the opportunities offered by Urban Stars in redefining the use of sport to tackle youth crime and anti-social behaviour as well as to promote youth inclusion in three London boroughs.

For too long sport has been used in this environment as an engagement tool or to provide diversionary activity. But it hasn’t targeted the root causes of social exclusion and youth alienation: poverty, lack of aspiration, no opportunities and few positive, realistic role models to offer inspiration. The Urban Stars programme will use sports not only as a way of engaging young people, but also as a pathway for personal and social development, raising aspirations and offering realistic routes into mainstream education, training and employment. In doing this we will also create inspiring role models that can have a long term impact on younger members of the communities we are working in.

This programme is unique in London and we will work with external researchers to provide an evidence base and best practice working as well as to develop new accreditation pathways that can be rolled out both in the UK and internationally.

I would like to thank the Laureus Sport For Good Foundation for their vision and investment of time and resources in this programme, and look forward to working closely with them over coming years in delivering a high quality project that will influence strategic developments and decisions on an international scale.

GARY STANNETT MBECeo Active Communities

At Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, we believe that Sport has the Power to change the World.Our organisation is focused on supporting programmes around the world that use sport to inspire positive change particularly for young people, regardless of whether they live in developing or developed countries.

The foundation supports 70 different organisations in 28 countries which are using sport to affect social change. Our focus, in addition to funding projects, is to disseminate the expertise and approaches of our network of partners to develop other communities’ capacity to use sport to address social issues affecting them. Our commitment is to identify, capture and communicate best practice that can be replicated across a wide range of cites and communities. Furthermore, the foundation supports monitoring and evaluation of programme delivery and research to validate the impact of our project partners.

In London Active Communities, Laureus has a unique partner which goes beyond funding programmes and training coaches. Urban Stars is delivering activities for young people aimed at the holistic development of youth that are at risk of being drawn into gangs and other antisocial behaviours. The combination of sport activities and life skills is proving to be an effective tool in diverting youth from crime into more positive environments and opportunities.

One of these opportunities will be the first accredited course in using sport specifically to tackle the problem of youth crime, the ‘Laureus Sport tackling crime award’. Beneficiaries of the programme will be able to gain an internationally recognised qualification in sport as a youth crime prevention tool. This qualification will help coaches, youth workers and other programme graduates to tackle some of the problems associated with gangs and youth crime facing communities across the UK and beyond.

The Urban Stars will be the new pioneers in delivering the Laureus mission, established by Nelson Mandela in 2000 ‘Sport has the Power to Change the World’.

DR. EDWIN MOSES Chairman Laureus Sport For Good Foundation

SEEING IS BELIEVINGThe Urban Stars project will be the subject of a 3 year action research programme, evaluating the use and impact of sports projects in promoting social inclusion and tackling youth crime in three crucial areas:

Individual young people involved in crime and anti-social behaviour plus gang members and ex-offenders.

The wider group of young people resident in deprived neighbourhoods and crime ‘hotspot’ areas.

The wider residential community in these neighbourhoods.

By providing a research and evaluation process alongside project delivery Urban Stars will be able to demonstrate not only its successes, but identify key factors in engaging the hardest to reach young people, the role sport has in this process not only as an engagement tool but as a pathway, and the skills needed by both staff, young people and project partners to ensure success.

This research will be invaluable to strategic partners, funding partners and delivery agencies alike in informing how projects using sport to promote youth inclusion and tackle youth crime and gang membership should be funded, structured and delivered both in the UKand overseas.

BUILDING THE TEAM The Urban Stars programme will also undertake a groundbreaking role in developing and implementing a new workforce development and accreditation pathway in the use of sport to tackle youth crime.

By professionalising the use of sport in tackling youth crime, we will ensure staff at all levels have the necessary skills to engage and work with a difficult, and sometimes volatile, client group while ensuring the safety of themselves, project participants and the wider community.

There will be a VRQ pathway in place to meet the needs of volunteers and part-time staff (Level 1), project workers (Level 2) and co-ordinators and managers (Level 3) by April 2010.

Led by Active Communities Network and Skills Active, the sector skills council for the sport and leisure industry, the scheme will work with a range of specialist agencies including Skills for Justice, the Metropolitan Police, Changebox Training, Youth Force Training and frontline agencies to ensure every qualification is relevant and practical.

This qualification pathway will be internationally accredited and we will initiate the roll out of the courses during 2010.

URBAN STARSThe Urban Stars programme is a new partnership initiative between the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation and Active Communities Network, using sport to promote youth inclusion and to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour within communities. Piloted from September 2008 and implemented fully from April 2009, the partnership brings together two organisations which are at the forefront of the use of sport for social change – Laureus Sport For Good Foundation which has funded and developed projects around the world and played a critical role in influencing strategic partners, sporting bodies and delivery agencies in utilising best practice, and the Active Communities Network charity whose London Active Communities arm has been at the cutting-edge of sport and community development across the capital and beyond.

Initially targeting the London Boroughs of Croydon, Lambeth and Southwark, the programme will deliver a range of services directly within these communities. This project activity will be coupled with a wider programme of research activity to provide underpinning knowledge and workforce training to contribute to a wider strategic agenda not only in the UK but internationally.

ON THE FRONTLINEThe Urban Stars programme will be delivered in the very heart of some of our most marginalised communities and target some of our most at-risk and hard to engage young people. This grassroots approach will ensure our projects are accessible and, by providing youth work and education support alongside sporting provision, we will be able to engage the widest range of young people resident in these boroughs.

In each borough the project will deliver a holistic programme of sports-based activity designed to raise the aspirations of young people and support them in addressing key issues in their lives. This will include the following activities that will be delivered year round and concurrent with each other, allowing young people to participate and access the programme at their own pace:

Grassroots sports participation programmes delivered at key times and to key user groups at the heart of the community using local facilities. Sports will initially focus on a combination of football, boxing and urban cricket, with other sports added according to local interest.

Referral programmes for young people excluded from mainstream education or already within the Youth Justice system.

Youth work programmes that focus on the personal development of the participants, raising aspirations and offering progression pathways into accreditation and vocational training through the Open College Network and National Governing Body coaching qualifications.

Support for participants to help them access volunteering experience, further training or work as coaches, mentors and young leaders.

URBAN STARS IN ACTION

LAMBETHThe Moorlands estate in Brixton and the Lilian Baylis Old School site in Kennington will be the focal points for Urban Stars in Lambeth. Moorlands will host the grassroots delivery component, incorporating boxing, football and urban cricket, whilst the Lilian Baylis Old School will act as the primary vocational training centre for referred young people, not just from Lambeth but across the wider programme.

In the first phase of the project, Urban Stars hosted Dr. Tommie Smith, gold medal winning athlete at the Mexico Olympic Games and subsequently banned for his ‘Black Power Salute’, and now an eminent sociologist and social campaigner in the USA. Over one hundred young people attended from across the three boroughs for a full day, attending conflict resolution and equality and diversity workshops and participating in boxing, football and athletics coaching programmes before watching a film on Dr Tommie Smith’s life. Following the film all participants were given the opportunity to participate in a presentation and question and answer session – focused on young people and weapons crime - that went on far beyond the time allocated.

Subsequently many attendees on that day have volunteered to become part of the Young Leaders programme and are now delivering sessions to other young people not only in sports coaching, but also in conflict resolution and anger management.

‘ The Urban Stars project has developed and trained a large number of participants during its initial pilot phase, but the event with Dr. Tommie Smith was a highlight in the way it motivated and enthused so many young people. Many of the attendees at the workshops would not have been expected to have engaged with anger management and conflict workshops as readily as they did, but the way the day was handled – sports participation, workshops, film and two way presentations- was fantastic. The fact that over 20 young people from that day are still involved in our training and personal development programme is an outstanding achievement given their backgrounds.’

RUBEL AHMEDDirector Changebox Training

CROYDONUrban Stars Croydon will be active in the South Norwood and Thornton Heath areas which lie in the north of the borough, with sporting activity centred on South Norwood Recreation Ground. Football and basketball will be the principal activities delivered from this site, with educational and training programmes on offer at Selhurst Park Stadium as part of a wider partnership with Crystal Palace FC Community Sports Trust.

MEETFREDDIE ROWLEYFreddie Rowley is 17 years old and comes from an area that has high levels of youth exclusion and where there are very few structured youth activities. He first engaged with the Urban Stars programme through drop in football sessions at South Norwood Recreation Ground on Friday evenings and Saturdays. As his involvement in football sessions continued, Freddie started to participate in the wider aspects of the programme, attending workshops tackling issues such as conflict and violence, equality and diversity. He then became a peer role model and qualified as a Level 1 Football Coach. He is now a volunteer youth leader and works with younger age groups from the same background as himself. His next step is to complete a Youth Work training course.

‘Projects like Urban Stars are great in areas like South Norwood – they give us something to do when otherwise we would be hanging around, and there isn’t much else in this area. For me, though, the best thing is that I have been given a chance to try new things that have helped me think about my future. The training has helped me to see what opportunities are out there and by volunteering and doing more courses I hope to make it in sport and youth work one day.’ FREDDIE ROWLEY

SOUTHWARKUrban Stars Southwark will target its activities on estates near to the Elephant and Castle shopping centre and transport interchange. This part of London has had many issues with territorialism and conflict so the initiation of the project here has received support from across the community. Activity here will focus on football and boxing using a range of community facilities, with training and development on offer at the nearby Lilian Baylis Old School facility in Kennington.

MEET HANNAH BEHARRY Hannah Beharry became involved in the first phase of the Active Communities Urban Stars project through her interest in boxing. Hannah has a background of crime and anti-social behaviour and was an active drug user when she became involved in the programme with little direction in her life. Since becoming involved in the boxing programme Hannah has developed as an athlete – she is now a competitive boxer and has represented England development squads in international competitions. Alongside this sporting achievement, Hannah has turned her life around and is now a qualified boxing coach and has undertaken an apprenticeship with the programme , acting as a role model for other young people on the programme with similar issues.

‘Getting involved in this project has helped me to turn my life around – I had always been interested in boxing and the support I have received from Active Communities has meant not only am I competing at an international level but I also have the opportunity to develop a career. I hope I can help others take the same steps forward as I have in the next few years.’HANNAH BEHARRY

Shinead PhilpottProject ContactActive Communities NetworkSouth Bank Techno Park90 London RoadLondonSE1 6LN

020 7717 1691shinead@activecommunities.org.uk For more information on the work of Laureus Sport for Good Foundation go to www.laureus.com or call 020 7514 2868