The Team
This project's parent organization is Search for Common Ground
It operates in Pan-Africa and Pan-Asia
It uses Football (Soccer)
Entered the Sport for Conflict Resolution Award
More about The Team
The Team draws on the immense interest in football within several African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries. Storylines feature characters who struggle to overcome significant differences between one another in order to achieve shared goals. It demonstrates the possibility of building peace when a larger objective is shared by previously contending groups: only through cooperative behavior can the players score goals.
The emphasis on sport acts as a community unifier, regardless of the economic, cultural, and linguistic mix that may otherwise create social tensions. Each episode of the series highlights different issues confronting the players by using tools of popular culture to communicate messages of conflict resolution and tolerance, e.g., music, the Internet, television, and cell phones. Culturally and contextually relevant, the stories will be entertaining and reflect characters with whom the audience can identify. In each country, we implement community-based peace building activities which take The Team off the screen and into real life, creating opportunities for people to use the messages of the show - and football - to reduce violence. A key theme we emphasize for viewers is to understand differences, while stressing commonalities – characters and contexts may vary, but the message of peace is the same worldwide.