Moving Forward
This project's parent organization is CARE
It operates in United States
It uses Multiple sports
Entered the Sport for Conflict Resolution Award
More about Moving Forward
Sport and play are essential for youth’s optimal development—addressing physical, cognitive, emotional and social development. For vulnerable youth whose lives are disrupted by natural disasters or conflicts, their physical needs should be followed by trauma-healing interventions, assisting in the normalization of their lives once again.
To address this, the CARE Sport for Social Change Initiative has partnered with Mercy Corps and Nike on the unique Moving Forward project. The collaboration has developed an innovative field-based toolkit to support psychosocial recovery of youth in post-emergency settings, serving as a resource guide to emergency responders and community mentors. Through structured sports and games, Moving Forward helps marginalized youth build self-esteem, resiliency and teamwork skills, ultimately “moving forward” from trauma to recovery. The project strives to build local capacity so that the curriculum can then be incorporated into longer-term programming.
An open source version of the toolkit has also allowed the development community to contribute best practices. Moving Forward identifies mentors in the emergency-affected communities, who then receive a multi-day training providing background to core psychosocial themes; their application through sport; how to identify signs of trauma; and methods to evaluate their outcomes.