There are many reasons to alarm us about the need of organization like Bridges Of Sports:

• India falls short of approximately 32000 coaches annually
• Only 16% women coaches, among the total coaches in Sports Authority of India
• Under the Panchayat Yuva Krida Aur Khel Abhiyan, there has been a shortage of 15000 kridashrees (community coach) every year
• Most CSR initiatives have been largely restricted to supporting established athletes
• India spends only 3 paise per person per day on sports development?
• With 30% of India below 14 years of age, we are building the future pool of talent with Bridges of sports but also developing roots for a healthier future of our nation

National Sports Corps (NSC)  consists of ex- athletes, physical education teachers, coaches and local volunteers. They will be trained and deployed in schools as coaches on a two-year fellowship. BOS uses the fellowship model for its implementation with sustainability and inclusiveness at crux of the model. Through the fellowship model, BOS will build a strong alumni network who will be nurtured towards being micro-entrepreneurs to accelerate the building of the sports ecosystem, through partnerships with government and ecosystem collaborations.

Become a rockstar for Bridges of Sports by starting a fundraiser to support a fellow or multiple fellows with us. You can track the progress of each fellow/coach and stories of children trained by him/her regularly and you can inform your donors about them.

Points to remember:

• Each campaign created by you would be around enabling a fellow or multiple fellows in under-served schools with sports equipments?
• During their fellowship of 2 years, the fellow will use the equipments to train children
• Each fellow trains roughly 100 children
• Cost of training one kid for a month comes as low as Rs 100

Our aim is to actively engage 10,000 fellows annually training over a million kids by 5th year of operations. We have 15 fellows and 300 kids actively training in 2 districts of Karnataka in just 5 month of our operation and aim to reach 100 fellows in next 12 months. Currently, we are working in Chikmagalur and Mundgod training children in Athletics-Track and Volleyball. Here are some of the highlights of our work.

The Siddis

In 1987, the Sports Authority of India (SAI) had started Special Areas Games Program and had identified that some children of the Indo-African Siddi community had excellent sporting potential. But the program was abruptly closed, despite success. There are over 40,000 Siddis residing in Karnataka alone and we will cover all of Siddi pockets based in Karnataka in our first year. We took the initiative to support the Siddi community on January, 2017 and restarted the sports program on 1st July, 2017. Currently we are training 150 kids in Loyola school, Mundgod.

Blind Football

We have organized events for the promotion of blind football and other sports as well with aim to empower differently-abled children to not shy away from sports. In March 2017, we conducted a district-level sports meet for differently-abled children in Chikkamagaluru, Karnataka in which over 100 children participated. We then introduced blind football at Asha Kiran School for visually impaired on April 6th on the eve of International day of sports for peace and development. From July 1st, we have started training children from Asha Kiran Blind School on a daily basis. We will train 1000 visually impaired kids in our first year to support the Government of India’s mission X1 million to take football to 11 million kids by October, before the launch of U-17 FIFA Worldcup.