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The end of the year always marks a time of reflection, celebration, and visioning for the year ahead. One of the defining characteristics of Soccer Without Borders is our commitment to learning and adapting our model to meet new challenges, needs, and contexts. As each of our programs grow to support higher numbers of participants, provide more program offerings, and expand to new locations, so do our Monitoring & Evaluation systems. In 2017, we made significant investments in our M&E tools in order to support the continued growth and innovation of our programs, including:
Mobilizing (pun intended!) all SWB programs and coaches to utilize UpActive's mobile app for easier attendance tracking and player registration. In the most recent school year alone, we registered youth from 56 countries who speak 29 native languages.
Quantifying what an inclusive and welcoming environment looks like through our new FAMILY Framework (Facilitation, Activity, Management, Identity, Language, and Youth-Centered), measured through coach self-assessments and peer observations. In 2017, SWB coaches completed 631 self-assessments, investing in quality improvement each and every day.
Translating the externally-validated High Impact Attribute Youth Survey into the 8 languages most commonly spoken by our participants (Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Nepali, Tigrinya, Somali, Karen, and French). More than 90% of SWB participants reported through this survey that they feel safe at SWB, trust their coach, accept people who are different from them, and feel comfortable speaking English at SWB, among other results.
Welcoming external evaluators to look at comparative school engagement and social self-efficacy data, leading to findings that SWB participants have fewer absences, less truancy, and higher social self-efficacy than their non-program peers in the same school.
Sharing our ground-level perspective to contribute to critical research and directives around several topics that affect our participants. Check out the recently-released report by Futures Without Violence which features SWB Uganda's contributions to reducing gender-based violence in Uganda.
We will continue utilizing our extensive M&E tools and data to inform our work in 2018 and beyond. As we learn, innovate, iterate, and measure, we intend to share our results more broadly through our blog posts, social media, newsletters, and annual report as well as in collaboration with partner organizations and research entities – as we recently did with Futures Without Violence.