This NGO uses football, Lego, music to teach leadership skills to students from low-resource communities
Mumbai-based NGO Enabling Leadership helps inculcate strong belief systems, develop excellent problem-solving skills, and build a keen sense of awareness.
Mohini and Teena’s stories tell us how it is like to play like a girl.
Not only are they first generation learners from a community of mostly daily wage earners, but they are also icons. All thanks to their seven-plus years of devotion to football.
The two girls, who recently passed their Secondary School Certificate (SSC) exams from a school in a suburban area in Northern Mumbai, are also alumni from Enabling Leadership’s ‘Just for Kicks’ programme.
Launched in 2011 in India with the motto ‘Everyone Plays’, Just For Kicks works in schools to help children garner multiple benefits of leadership development, using football as a medium.
During Just For Kicks programme
“For the first year or so, our families didn’t know we were playing football. They knew we were out playing,” says Mohini.
Teena adds, “For us, it was an outlet to play on the field – something we wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity for, were it not for football.”
According to reports, more than one billion children do not have the opportunity to learn these skills, which are required if they are to become productive and responsible adults, capable of being role models, positive contributors, and global citizens.
Enabling Leadership was founded to support programmes that used creative or alternative mediums to teach leadership and 21st century skills, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, confidence, or collaboration.
Apart from Just for Kicks, it has two other flagship programmes – ‘Music Basti’ and ‘Build Maya’.
These programmes use creative methods to inculcate strong belief systems, develop excellent problem-solving skills, and build a keen sense of awareness in the children it works with.
Team at Enabling Leadership
“At Enabling Leadership, we strive to enable every child to be this kind of leader, i.e., an individual who seeks to truly make a meaningful difference in their community. We use music, football, and Lego to teach these through unique and fun programmes, focussed on working with children from at-risk and under-resourced communities. We are a global for-purpose organisation. Today, we reach and impact over 6,200+ children in low- income and poorly resourced urban and rural schools,” says Faith Gonsalves, Director for Public Engagement, who founded Music Basti in 2008.
Empowering children
A global for-purpose organisation, Enabling Leadership is registered in the Netherlands, the USA, and Singapore, and works with children in India and Cambodia. It works with children who are from at-risk and low-resource communities, via working with government and low-income schools.
Music Basti’s group-based music learning programme enables children from under-resourced schools to tell the stories of their dreams and communities through original songs and public performances, instilling important leadership skills in them.
Music Basti
On the other hand, Build Maya enables children to create a world of their imagination. Using the principle of positive play, students design solutions using building blocks for real-world challenges in their home, school, village, or the larger community.
Partnerships are formed with identified government schools across seven cities (Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Dharwad, and Kumta), where a programme is implemented for a minimum of three years. Coaches and teachers are selected through a public recruitment process, trained, and placed in identified government schools for the duration of the programme.
At present, Enabling Leadership has around 150 coaches and teachers, and about 70 staff members.
Savita Kabbur, Programme Manager of Build Maya, says,
“When we started the programme two years ago, we were not sure how the students would react to building blocks because unlike their counterparts in urban areas, our students do not have as much of an exposure. But we started seeing they were learning a lot while playing, including concepts like team-work and conflict-resolution – and not because they are made to, but because they want to.”
Build Maya
Apart from Faith, the management team today includes Ravi Sonnad (CEO of Founder of Enabling Leadership), Neha Sahu (Director for Operations, who co-founded Just For Kicks in 2011), Vikas Plakkot (Director for Business Development, who co-founded Just For Kicks in 2011), and Aparna Nayampally (Director for International Expansions in Southeast Asia). And they met each other while working together on different projects.
“Collaborations or mergers in the non-profit sector are less common. However, given the shared mission of the three organisations, the idea of coming together made sense, and was intended to help us pool resources and strengths, and be able to serve as many children as possible together,” says Faith.
Overcoming challenges
Apart from some of the general challenges that non-profit organisations face, Enabling Leadership’s mission has a long-term vision as some of the skills are difficult to measure in the short-term.
“While there is a lot of compelling evidence globally about the effectiveness of the kind of creative mediums we use, the relevance of 21st century skills, and a new definition of leadership that recognises these skills and attributes as being critical, many people are still looking for quick-fix solutions for behaviour and attitude change problems, which is not possible to achieve. To enable a new generation of children who will be compassionate, caring, and innovative, and work together to protect and build a truly sustainable world for generations to come will take many years – and we are ready for the challenge,” Faith says.
Going ahead, the team hopes to reach more children through its programmes in India, and grow its pilot initiative, which has just launched in Cambodia. Its programs are funded by institutional donors and sponsors, as well as hundreds of individual sponsors.
(Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta)