Anne Meaux, Social Innovation Officer at PLAY International, shares insights into how PLAY uses sport to promote education, inclusion, and well-being. She highlights the organization’s innovative approach through the creation of educational sports games, the continuous improvement of their methods, and the establishment of Playlab, a space dedicated to co-creation and addressing societal challenges such as childhood development, health, and refugee inclusion.

In what ways do you believe sports can drive social change, and how has PLAY International leveraged sports to create positive impacts within the communities you serve? Can you share specific examples?

PLAY International uses sport as a tool to promote the education, inclusion and well-being of children and young people around the world. We are convinced that sport has great educational potential, if it is designed as such. Sport activities can be a unifying force, transcend differences, and bring us together. 

PLAY’s model is to co-create sports games that meet the needs of children and those working with them. These games are recreational, educational and active.

The advantage of sports games is that they’re fun, and children get into them spontaneously and with motivation. But these activities also have great educational potential, because they get all the children involved in a subject (in a game, everyone has to participate and has their part to play!), get them moving to think (and vice versa), and above all, through the game situation, the children will experience situations of injustice, frustration, mistakes and successes, from which – with the guidance of the facilitator – they will be able to make links with their everyday lives.

For example, we have created several games on the inclusion of children with disabilities. The aim was twofold: to create games that would raise awareness among able-bodied children about disability, accessibility and inclusion (how does it feel to be in a situation of injustice because I have a mobility constraint? How can we remedy this situation by changing the rules collectively?); and, to create games that would enable all children, whether disabled or not, to play together. 

After the co-creation of games, our aim is to train teachers, educators, sport coaches, etc., in the content created and in the use of sport as a lever for education and development. 

This is notably the case for our games promoting inclusion for children with disabilities. Lately, we’ve been running several training courses specifically on our program about Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This content is based on the thesis work of a doctoral student who spent 3 years at PLAY working on this project (in collaboration with the LP3C and VIP2 laboratories at the University of Rennes). As a result of this action-research, we were able to offer a complete educational kit to develop the social skills of children with ASD and neurotypical children. Prior to the training, the educators we exchanged with told us how difficult it was to set up this type of activity, due to a lack of knowledge, tools and support. Through our training courses, we aim to provide a response to these obstacles, to enable access to educational and inclusive sport for all.

PLAY International says that social innovation is a collective sport, and with pedagogy it is its first means of action.  How does PLAY International integrate innovation into its sports initiatives? Can you provide examples of how sports-related innovations have helped address social or educational challenges in the communities you work with?

At PLAY, we adopt an iterative and continuous improvement approach at every stage of our projects, in order to respond as effectively as possible to the needs of the field and come up with solutions that are as relevant and impactful as possible.

Firstly, regarding the games we create, we believe that sports games are a powerful tool, but one that needs to be thought through beforehand to be effective. As I mentioned earlier, we aim to put children in a situation where they can play and then, by modifying the rules and introducing different concepts, get them to think about societal issues. The aim is for the knowledge that the children learn to “come from them”, which will have a much greater impact: transforming the experience into learning.

So, after the creation of PLAYdagogy in 2012, followed by socio-sport activities to develop psychosocial skills, and 100% cooperative games to get beyond the competitive framework children are used to, over the last few years we have developed a new methodology for reinforcing fundamental knowledge through sports games. The aim is to give teachers new tools, so that Maths, reading and writing can also be practiced in the playground. For example, through group games and team calculation strategies, children can use the game to reinvest what they have learned in class about the construction of numbers and calculation. These new tools are very well received by primary school teachers (with children aged 6 to 10), who have seen their children’s levels drop over the years, and in particular the gap grow wider for children with the greatest difficulties, for whom staying focused in class can be difficult. For these children, using movement and play is a very relevant way of keeping them connected to school skills.

PLAY has always innovated pedagogically to create new levers within the games to best meet the needs of children and local issues. In this way, the games created and set up in Burundi will be different from those created in the Comoros or Kosovo.

Then, in addition to the games, we adapt our deployment models to the needs and constraints of the field. As a training organization, adapting our interventions is essential to ensure that we are giving the right keys to the people being trained. 

Social innovation also means starting from innovative local initiatives and helping them to grow and develop, so that in the long term they reach more children and have a greater impact. PLAY is convinced of the importance of building the capacity of local players, and in recent years has decided to go one step further by offering Incubator programs for educational and sports organizations. This incubation approach, which began in 2018 with the Playlab and has continued with a 3 years Incubator in West Africa, and has given rise to many other projects, has enabled local structures to be strengthened overall so that they can gain in impact, stability and sustainability.

Finally, innovation also means looking at emerging issues, problems that are not yet addressed, or for which the answers are not yet satisfactory. That’s why PLAY decided in 2017 to set up Playlab, the social innovation laboratory of the NGO and, more broadly, of the Sport-Development sector.

How does the Playlab facilitate co-creation, sharing, and support to address issues such as childhood development, health, employment, and humanitarian crises? Can you share specific examples of the innovations and projects that have emerged from this initiative?

The Playlab opened in 2017 with the aim of promoting and fostering innovation in and through sport. The Playlab therefore has a dual objective: 

  • To encourage the emergence and development of local initiatives
  • To develop new solutions, with and for players on the ground, in response to societal issues. 

The Playlab aims to act as a catalyst of needs in the field, by maintaining an ongoing dialogue with field missions and local partners to identify the needs of each and identify potential cross-cutting issues. Playlab also aims to be open to external stakeholders, and through its participation in numerous education and sport-development networks, will identify emerging needs or initiatives in the sector.  

To carry out its missions as effectively as possible and encourage collective intelligence, Playlab has a number of levers: working with research laboratories on joint projects (such as welcoming PhD students to join Play as I mentioned earlier) ; creating opportunities for exchange with ecosystems of stakeholders (through working groups, workshops, events, etc.) ; advocacy on a national and international scale ; overall and cross-disciplinary support for Play missions on the development of innovation or on various themes.

In addition to Playlab’s aim of being a common reflection group for people involved in sport and education, we also develop and pilot innovative projects – whether in terms of their themes, audiences or models – to build our skills and expertise on emerging societal issues.

This approach is reflected in our programs for exiled people, a topic that Playlab has been working on since 2018. We started with an Incubator, mentioned earlier, to support organizations in welcoming exiled people into their structures. 

On the strength of this experience, we realized the lack of tools available to educators in the field and decided to pursue our actions by co-creating educational and sports games for families, children and unaccompanied minors (teenagers). The aim was to provide tools for professionals in the field who work with exiled children and young people daily. 

These solid foundations have enabled us to diversify the responses we have provided in recent years. Indeed, the issue of including refugee children is a global one that needs to be tackled holistically, which is why over the years we have created responses aimed at: 

  • Social workers, to develop young people’s psycho-social skills through sporting activities, and give access to sport to exiled people, through the co-piloting of the Terrains d’Avenir program in Ile-de-France (supported by the Olympic Refuge Foundation)
  • Teachers, to encourage diversity and inclusion in classes for new arrivals, notably through our TTS (Together Through Sport) project, for the inclusion for Ukrainian refugee children in Poland and Romania 
  • Sports clubs, to give all young people access to their local sports club, through the REPLAY project we are launching in Italy.

Our aim is to go further and offer solutions to the young people who need them most, particularly in terms of psychosocial support through sporting activity.