Gender Equality Jordan Project #45393

Build Community through Sport for Girls in Jordan

by Reclaim Childhood, Inc.

Project Report | Oct 1, 2024
Welcoming the 2024-25 Programming Year in Jordan!

By Anna Barrett | Executive Director

Working hard at soccer practice!

September marks the beginning of the new program year at RC, and this month, we welcomed almost 500 girls from 8 nationalities back to the soccer field! They will spend 14 weeks working with coaches to improve their skills, diving into socioemotional learning conversations, and having fun with their peers. As part of our standard coach training, RC’s coaches gathered in the leadup to the season to learn new soccer skills, talk about how to welcome new girls into the program, and prepare for an awesome few months.

This year, the fall season also marks the beginning of RC’s new three-year strategic plan. While each of the past two years have featured the launch of a new hub site, our focus over the next 12 months is to build up the capacity of the four existing locations. First up: the expansion of the Qudrati teen leadership program!

Qudrati, or “My Ability”, gives RC’s oldest participants the chance to dive deeper into socioemotional learning off the field as they build leadership skills and prepare for their futures. Each cohort participates for a year, meeting on weekends 30+ times and wrapping up their journey by leading their own community service project. The program has run in our original Amman and Zarqa site since 2017, and this year, we’re thrilled to expand to Mafraq. The three cohorts came together to launch the year and set goals for their participation - stay tuned for updates on their progress!

Even as we dive headfirst into the new year, we’re still looking back at an amazing summer! Over six weeks, RC ran dynamic summer sports camp and league days across our hub sites, reaching 472 girls. We also hosted outreach camps in the communities of Al Baqaa and Shouneh, welcoming an additional 170 participants. A special thank you to our dedicated coaches, interns, and partners for making it all happen. Our summer flagship programming remains as important as ever for girls during the more isolated academic break.

We’re looking forward to another exciting year here at Reclaim Childhood, and we’re grateful for your ongoing support of our programs!

Girls enjoying a day of summer outreach camp.

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Jun 6, 2024
A Spring of Community at Reclaim Childhood

By Anna Barrett | Executive Director

An older RC participant coaches a young girl

Traditionally, Reclaim Childhood breaks for the holy month of Ramadan in Jordan. With many coaches and participants fasting, physical activity after the school day is challenging. While we don’t get to gather often, this Ramadan was full of community building for the RC family. Over 130 girls from across all four sites came together with their coaches for some light games before breaking their fast together with an iftar. We also hosted iftars for the coaches and the teen leadership cohorts, maintaining and creating connections throughout the pause of our main programming.

By the time we hit the field for frisbee season, spring had arrived in Jordan, and girls were thrilled to be back outside with their friends. Bookended by Ramadan and intensive school exams, spring frisbee is the shortest after school practice season, but we fit in a lot! With 16 practices a week across the four hub sites, girls had a ton of fun with one of their favorite sports.

As we prepared for the last week of the season, we ran a training to revisit the concepts that coaches had explored in our fall trauma-informed coaching training. They shared successes and challenges over the past months, while brainstorming how to make the final week meaningful for the girls. They implemented some amazing ideas, from older girls acting as leaders for the younger group’s session to potlucks and informal time at the end of the final practices.

In addition, we ran a play day for our 6-11 year old cohort and their families. Mothers engaged in well-being stations focused on nutrition and exercises to boost their physical and mental health, while girls and their siblings played small games. It was an amazing day, focused on giving families the same opportunities as their daughters/sisters to play, learn about healthy lifestyles, and build community.

Next up: RC’s flagship summer program! We started as a summer camp in 2008, and the need for safe, culturally acceptable spaces for girls to get out of the house during the academic break still remains. We can’t wait to get back out on the field with the girls as soon as the school year is over!

Coaches celebrate their win during a training game

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Feb 6, 2024
A Deep Dive into Coach Development

By Anna Barrett | Executive Director

Celebrating with their training certificates!

At Reclaim Childhood, the coaching staff is at the heart of everything that we do. Made up of Jordanian and refugee women from the same communities as the participants we serve, coaches recruit girls, maintain ongoing communication with their families, supervise bus pickup and drop off, and run all of our practices and camps. While that list is already long enough, it doesn’t even speak to our coaches’ most important role: building caring relationships and acting as mentors for every girl that comes through RC’s programs.

One of RC’s main strategic pillars is investing in coach development to support these women in what can be a challenging role. We have long run coach clinics before each season, interspersed with one-off training sessions. This fall, we had the opportunity to invest even further in coach development. Thanks to the support of the Viking Global Foundation, we partnered with Edgework Consulting, one of the global leaders in trauma-informed coaching.

Over four days, twenty coaches and Maren from Edgework dove into the overarching question of how healing happens and how RC can be a part of it. Many of RC’s participants (and coaches) have experienced trauma, whether through displacement, conflict, poverty, or a combination of factors. Research shows that when designed correctly, sport can be a powerful force in recovery.

The training’s goal was to link the brain science of the effect of trauma on the brain with specific techniques and games that our coaches – in this critically important role of caring adult – can use at RC programming to support girls dealing with this. With this in mind, we spent more time on the field than in the classroom, mirroring the coaches’ context (and having a whole lot of fun playing new games)!

After a fantastic fall soccer season, we’ve transitioned into basketball season for the rainy winter, and it’s been amazing to watch coaches put the training into action at practice. We’re grateful for this opportunity and we can’t wait to see how it continues to make RC programming a healing space for all girls!

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