The Game of Life: Football for Deaf Children
This project's parent organization is Mifalot- Hapoel Tel Aviv Football Club's Education and Social Project
It operates in Israel
It uses Football (Soccer)
Entered the Sport For Social Inclusion Award
More about The Game of Life: Football for Deaf Children
A new and innovative use of sport for development, taking a largely ignored social group – deaf Arab children –building them up physically and emotionally through football. This group faces 2 problems of social inclusion: 1. Arabs in a Jewish state, a minority deprived of equal opportunity rights. 2. Deafness, a disability that denies them from being treated as equals. Through this program, these children build up motor and social skills.
They improve their ability to communicate, self image improves and they are afforded a feeling of participating in society as equals. Football becomes an educational-social field, with norms and challenges equivalent to those they face in real life. The use of this world and its terminology for imparting life skills is a process of great potential for special needs groups.
Fun football practice allows groups to practice these skills in a protected , guided environment, based on mediation processes later transferred from the field to real life. This program also allows the participants an opportunity to interact with ‘normative’ children - combining a short intervention program in which there two teams – one of deaf children, and one of normative children, becoming acquainted playing together, benefiting the normative children as well.