Sports and Community Wellbeing: Kicking Off!

by Kanishk Srinivasan

 

Dakshin is entering uncharted territory with the introduction of a programme that aims to use sports as an entry point to engage with youth from fishing communities on topics of social and environmental resilience. Pandemic-induced restrictions are now an old and familiar hurdle, but we like to think that we have made the most of our time. While we had to revisit our original plans of conducting a pilot study in the Andamans and Odisha, we have instead focused on strengthening and developing other aspects of the programme — designing an alternative study which we can conduct remotely, developing a literature review on how to design an integrated, sports-based educational curriculum, compiling a database of existing drills and activities to use as part of this curriculum as well as fundraising work.

The aim of the study on youth in fishing communities is to develop an understanding of levels of access to and participation in sports and outdoor recreational activities. We also want to develop an understanding of their perceptions of their social and environmental surroundings which will help us develop a programme that strengthens their engagement with these issues.

At the same time, we have also been conducting a literature review on how to design sports-based community wellbeing interventions and have also created a database of existing drills and activities that are being used by other organisations with similar objectives. Using this literature review and database, we aim to design a curriculum involving sports-based drills and activities to transfer knowledge and educate participants and beneficiaries on a variety of topics, ranging from STEM subjects to more abstract topics like gender equity, leadership and community health.

We have quite a few things in the pipeline, and can’t wait to kick it off as soon as we can!

We would like to thank Kamesh Bharadwaj for the image.