Playing Football With Care Bears in Tanzania [Ice Cream Sundae]

This newsletter was originally published via email on the 10th April 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae with the form on the right-hand side column or here (The newsletter format shifted from long to shorter form since).

I first found out about The Great Football Giveaway thanks to a post in my friend Neil’s blog, I think back in 2008 if memory serves. I was immediately hooked by the simple and compelling idea: 1 ball = £10

Thanks to donations from supporters, The Great Football Giveaway organises trips to go and give footballs and netballs directly to children to play with, in poor and remote areas of rural African countries. I highly recommend watching this short video about the project; it really says it all and more. If your heart doesn’t melt watching it you might be on your way to become like Professor Coldheart, I’m afraid even the Care Bears can’t help you.

Quick parenthesis to give you the chance to read this Sundae along with music; last week my good friend James recommended checking out an event his friend John was putting on at The Social in London. He used to organise large Afro-beat parties in China under the name No Go Die a few years ago. The music was excellent for dancing and appropriate for this Sundae about Africa. Here’s a good No Go Die mix, I’m listening to it while writing this.

Back to our main topic, I loved the simplicity of it: £10 = 1 ball.

Stripping down an initiative to an extremely simple proposition, getting to the essence of a message is exactly the kind of challenges I tackle as a marketing and brand strategist. This is the kind of clarity I aspire to as a result of my work.

You know exactly what you’re getting and what is being done with the money.

Moreover, you’ll be shown. Supporters get updates about each trip as it’s taking place: photos, videos and even their personalised messages on balls. Supporters know exactly what happened the day the ball they donated £10 for was given.

Nobody says it’s going to solve the world’s toughest issues.

It’s not feeding the hungry or curing diseases.

It is however going to make the day of one or several children in rural Africa who likely only had bunched up plastic supermarket bags tied with string to use as a makeshift ball until then.

It brings play and the widest smiles on faces you’ve ever seen. The joy is infectious, whole communities, schools and sometimes even entire villages join the kids to play ball and have fun.

It’s serendipitous.

It’s a gift.

It’s sheer happiness.

After all, what else are we after?

And if you can afford it, that’s definitely worth £10.

I also find this kind of project fascinating because it’s a positive difference made on a micro-scale, for one or several kids somewhere in rural Africa.

Of course it doesn’t replace initiatives that I’d qualify of acting at a macro-scale; large non-profit organisations like Save the Children or UNICEF being good examples. I’m no expert on the way they operate, though I understand their goals, infrastructure and methods are anchored in a long-term and large-scale view of humanitarian and developmental assistance. We could say it’s more of the “top down” view of making a positive difference.

This doesn’t invalidate organisations and projects working on what could be called “bottom up” initiatives like The Great Football Giveaway. On the contrary, every time they have an occasion to collaborate, larger charities are delighted to get footballs for kids to play with.

TGFG also focuses on remote areas that don’t have as many visits or activities from other charities, an important point of difference. These kinds of initiatives can also be amplifiers of larger charities working with children who might be lacking in simple and playful fun.

Fast forward to 2010; Neil is looking for volunteers to go to Tanzania with him.

Fast forward a couple of years to 2010 and Neil announces on his blog that he is forming one of the first teams of volunteers to raise money for balls and then go give them directly out to kids in rural Tanzania. He was hoping to find two people adventurous enough to follow him; eight of us raised our hands from a variety of backgrounds: advertising, media, coaching, hospitality and sales. Hugh who appeared on my podcast was one, and later my brother Björn and his wife Justine also joined the team.

We raised money through our personal networks and organised a fundraising event in London. In the end we had about 2,000 footballs and netballs, almost as many hand pumps and just under two weeks to go and give them out. We were given a broad geographic area to cover and a one-page sheet with a few bullet-point guidelines about the best ways to give the balls. Things like: “Always give the ball directly to a child, not an adult unless you’re certain they are in a position to give the ball and let the children play fairly (like a school teacher). Other adults might sooner take the ball from kids and play themselves, or sell the ball for cash.”

The rest of the planning was pretty much up to us. The area was the Southeast of Tanzania, one of the country’s poorest. Most of the international attention and assistance in the country goes to the capital, Dar Es Salaam and Arushanear Mount Kilimanjaro. After a little bit of research I suggested we make the small town of Kilwa Masoko on the coast our main base, from there we’d split out to cover more ground in three separate teams in different directions.

We also took a few days to drive down to the town of Lindi, approximately 150 kilometres to the South, and give balls on the way.

The whole experience was so mind-blowing that for months I didn’t know where to start or what to write in my blog about it. It’s definitely one of the best and most exciting things I’ve done in my life. While we don’t necessarily see each other very often, nor are we necessarily close friends, I know the nine of us on this trip remember it dearly. From the first drink we shared after landing in Dar Es Salaam we kicked things off laughing and taking the piss out of each other as if we’d been friends for years. We formed bonds and memories that will last for life.

We all saw the opportunity to contribute to something exciting and fun. We were also all in some kind of important transition, like changing careers or thinking about it.

We improvised and learned on the go. We had three four-wheel drive jeeps with local drivers to also help us translate and make recommendations about the best places to go. The container of balls had been delivered to Kilwa. Every day we’d stop at the container to fill the back of the jeeps with deflated balls. The two sitting in the back would start pumping them full, ready to be given and played with. At least in my jeep, the person in front usually decided where we’d be going, often randomly, or with instructions from a previously met person.

In the jeep we’d say things like, “Hey look, a dirt path there! Let’s turn left and see where it goes” or “I think I spotted a school to the right, let’s check it out!” Whether we’d come across random groups of children, schools, or remote bush villages each day was filled with joy and surprises.

Online research had yielded little results as to other non-profit organisations we could contact in advance, as we had been told this area of the country wasn’t particularly visible or known. Still, Neil had located and contacted an orphanage South of Dar Es Salaam that we could stop and visit on the way to Kilwa. The joy and happiness of the kids playing ball was beautiful. The establishment specialised in getting orphan children off the streets of the capital to care for them and provide them with an education.

Play is vital for children but with a tight budget essential amenities are of course prioritised; footballs, netballs and hand pumps that they couldn’t afford were welcomed and loved.

We organised playful competitions with the children to “win” the balls for the orphanage. In similar circumstances we’d talk with people in charge at the orphanage or schools to quiz the children on lessons they had recently learned. Other times we’d come across a few kids playing and stop to just throw a ball at them.

We were emboldened and excited by our first day, thinking we’d figured this whole thing out. The following day we thought we didn’t planning, closed the large map Neil had set on a table and just pointed on the map to the nearest town, Kilwa Kivinje.

It was a Sunday morning.

We hadn’t paid attention to the day of the week.

It was a chilling experience.

From the moment we showed up and gave a first ball things didn’t go as hoped – it was immediately was stolen from a larger teen who ran away, we saw adults adults stealing balls and fighting over them It was either mass or market day so the centre of town was busy with people, quickly driving a raving crowd to almost assaulting the jeeps of these crazy Mzungu giving brand new footballs away.

The feeling going on was nothing like what we intended, it was aggressive, greedy, with a hint of violence in the air.

We retreated, a little shaken and confused.

We stopped on the way of the town, close by what seemed to be a makeshift football pitch. Some of us started talking about what went wrong with the drivers. Meanwhile, I think it was Darren and Hugh, took a football from a jeep, walked up to the pitch and starting kicking the ball. That attracted the attention of a couple of nearby kids. They invited them to come and play. In no time we had a several groups of kids playing and having fun with us on the pitch.

The drivers helped us organise a quiz to give away a few balls, having the children promise to play together. The magic was back.

We put more thinking into our planning after that. We organised our days around going to schools in the area as a main objective, and branching out from there if we saw random kids, or heard of other worthwhile establishments to visit.

On our way to Lindi we drove by another jeep with a Save the Children logo.

We flagged them down and learned they were a small unit providing pre and post-natal care to women in remote bush villages. We gave them a bunch of balls so they could give them in the much further away villages we wouldn’t have time to visit ourselves. I’d write messages and take photos of all the balls my friends had donated money for, so I could tell them exactly where the money went.

In the evenings, we’d regroup and talk about our experiences of the day, trying to make sense of it all – from sometimes feeling kind of useless with meagre footballs in the face of so much needed in the country like health care, education, infrastructure, clean water, and more. And the following moment, one of us would share one of the magical moments we kept having of sheer happiness of these kids playing. We also had memorable laughs and stories around the dinner table and drinking the local firewater with the actual image of a fire on the label; Konyagi.

We weren’t helping solve tough issues yet we also knew that whatever we were doing was so emotional and magical that I’m certain it was valuable.

I guess this could be what I’d like to leave you with for this newsletter. As we grow up and become adults, we might occasionally take too much of a serious approach to what’s important. We worry about our work, taxes, paperwork, healthcare, retirement, etc.

Of course these are all important but ultimately not the best indicators of happiness or even fulfilment. In your planning of everything serious and important for your life, make sure to leave room for play too.

Whatever play you enjoy: kicking a ball with friends or children, playing a game, finger painting, playing a musical instrument, or even fun behind closed doors with your partner.

Happiness is never far away from play, and that’s kind of invaluable.

If you have £10 to spare or more, why not give a ball to a child somewhere in rural Africa?

Thanks for reading, as every week I really appreciate your time. If you’ve enjoyed it and know someone else who might, can you forward them the email please? Sharing it on social media also works, look to the bottom and you’ll find buttons to post it on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin.

If you’re looking for something to listen to as well, this week I published a fun and fascinating conversation with Anjali Ramachandran for my podcast. Anjali is the Head of Innovation for a global media agency and also co-founded an online support network for women in technology and business, Ada’s List.

To finish, I’ve officially completed my last client project, if ever you hear of anyone looking for a brand & marketing strategist (preferably in London) please keep in touch, I’d be glad to be introduced and find out how I can help.

Till next week!

Cheers
Willem

Dragonmeet 2015 Tabletop Gaming Convention

I was at the Dragonmeet tabletop gaming convention in London last weekend. I’ve started mentioning it around my blog, website and podcast that I’ve been interested in tabletop gaming for a long time and I’ve been actively getting into it this year. I’ve also started putting more time into what lessons can be brought from tabletop gaming into other areas, particularly with work in marketing strategy and planning. My talk at the European Planning Conference was about that, I’ve already mentioned I recorded it and I’m going to publish the audio as a podcast episode soon.

I met with several interesting roleplaying game designers, for some reason several of whom were science-fiction themed. I don’t know if it’s my own interest these days leading me towards those, or if there were more science-fiction themed roleplaying games who had stalls.

I attended a few different seminars, including announcements for Pelgrane Press and was particularly interested in finding out about a recently published collection of original story games – that’s a style of games somewhere between a board game and a roleplaying game, where players typically build a story together. It’s called Seven Wonders, an anthology of seven games from different authors. I’m interested because most of the game authors / designers are in large majority women, and because the topics were out of the ordinary fantasy or science-fiction tropes. These games propose questions like what you be ready to sacrifice to protect your family, what happens back at the village when the heroes are gone adventuring, or how dystopian societies come to be. Unfortunately the book was sold out by the afternoon when I thought of buying it, though there will be a new print run soon and I’m looking forward to reading it.

I’ve heard a lot of good feedback and reviews from Sarah Newton’s game called Mindjammer. The game is already published though she is currently running a Kickstarter crowdfunding project to for new adventures to be written within the same science-fiction universe, and there’s also a novel. I just backed the project, for those interested there are several levels of participating where you can save on buying the main book and game at the moment. I talked about the project with Sarah, she has been working on it for several years and hearing the description made me think of Iain M. Banks Culture universe. I’m apparently not the first person to say that, even though Sarah hadn’t read any of those novels when she starting writing Mindjammer. If you enjoy The Culture novels, I’d recommend checking it out.

I also met Carlos of Burning Games who successfully crowdfunded a science-fiction themed roleplaying game called Faith, with the interesting fact that it presents itself like a board game, with a lot of tokens and cards typically not needed in a tabletop roleplaying game. It intends to be a half-way to introduce people to roleplaying games, which is an interesting idea. I also met with Ed of Imagine RPG and talked about his sci-fi game called Era: The Consortium, for which he wrote 500 years of detailed and playable setting history.

There were many people playing and testing all sorts of games. I had the opportunity of trying Microscope, an ‘indie’ game. It’s pretty interesting, though I’d barely call it a game; it is a methodology for narrating periods, events, and scenes in the history of a civilisation (or of whatever you want I guess). There were many interesting ideas I think I can steal for brainstorming sessions and workshops, I bought the pdf and I’m going to study this a little further.

The convention is also an opportunity for game designers to test some game prototypes. I had fun meeting with Henry and trying his wrecking ball game prototype. The principle is simple and a great idea: you have to build a tower with cubes, try to destroy other people’s towers with a wrecking ball or a demolition truck while protecting your own construction. We talked about the best way to balance this kind of game, how much the pieces should weight or what size they should be, etc. I wish Henry luck and success with the next steps, at least it seems like a great idea for a game.

I attended a live recording of the Ken and Robin talk about stuff audio podcast, both of them are quite known and successful writers and game designers, several of the games they worked on were for sale during the event as well.

It was a great day, I was just a little disappointed by the fact that the attendance seemed to be pretty old on and very male skewed. I’m not sure if it’s representative of the event in particular or of hobby gaming in the UK though. Women are typically in minority from what I could see in similar events in France, maybe 25 – 30% women, where in this event there seemed to be like half that many unfortunately. Lastly, it was almost entirely caucasians in attendance. A little too stereotypical, mostly full of aging white dudes…  Even though I believe that hobby games are evolving in a good way, generally growing as a category and becoming mainstream in the past few years, there’s probably still more that can be done to encourage new people to play these kinds of games, including women and other ethnicities.

With my friends at the French tabletop roleplaying podcast Les Voix d’Altaride we are preparing for an episode on the topic of women and roleplaying games (in France / French speaking countries) and have already collected over 300 responses from an online survey to ask people about it, I’m looking forward to analysing the results.

Back from Africa

February 2011 update: I took about 3 months to finish this draft, a few more things have happened since.

I had an absolutely fantastic trip to Tanzania with The Great Football Giveaway in November 2010, you can follow the events during the trip here. By now I can safely say it has been a life changing experience for me. I gave up on the draft in December partly out of simply being lazy, partly busy at work, partly because it was such a rich experience I didn't know what to write about it exactly. Altogether the photo above illustrates pretty well how overwhelming it was - in a good way.

We were nine people on Neil's team (who has done an awesome job with kick-starting the whole project and leading the team) joined by our three amazing drivers: Sebastian, David and Josef. We got along like a house on fire for the ten days of the Football Giveaway: as much banter and piss-taking as well as more serious conversations and sharing personal stories. They are all people I now hold dear in my heart, with whom I shared this unique experience. You can find everyone's names on our JustGiving page, and you can also still make donations for more balls to be given to children on future trips.

I was lucky enough to have more holiday time, so while the others flew back home I spent two more weeks in Tanzania; a few days on a safari in the Selous and a week on the beach in Zanzibar.

A lot comes to mind in wanting to describe the whole experience, about Africa and Tanzania, the children, infrastructures in the country or lack thereof, charity vs. gifts, education, play, the development of tourism and who benefits from it, large charity organisations / NGOs, animal conservation and hunting, the amazing people I met there, smiles on so many children's faces, and probably a lot more I forget right now.

I can talk about any of these points at length but the best way I can sum it up for now, even though these simple words don't do justice to the experience, is that life is too short not to do things I really enjoy doing. I don't mean that I particularly deprived myself of that before, on the contrary if you now me you know I'm rather bon vivant. It's just that this is what's present when thinking of the trip.  I'm extremely privileged to have a lot of choice in the way I lead my life and I want to make sure I take advantage of that, both for myself and to make a difference for others.

More specifically about my trip, you can check out some photos on my Flickr and we are in the process of editing all the videos we have from the Football Giveaway. If you ever fancy a safari in Tanzania, I highly recommend going to Selous and staying at the Selous River Camp. Owned and managed by Kenny and Kate, I loved their blog and was right to go there; they made me feel very welcome and I had an awesome time at their camp discovering the Selous and generally relaxing relaxing by the river.

To finish off, you can get that a lot was bubbling away in my head in December, I'll write about that in my next post.

Giving away footballs in Tanzania

In the very exciting news category, I'm going away on a fabulous adventure to Tanzania in November this year with The Great Football Giveaway.

If you haven't heard about them before, I wrote about it a while ago, they are a small organisation whose belief is that "no kid should be denied the chance to kick a ball about. It's one of life's most simple pleasures." I don't particularly care that much for football in general, and certainly not for the giant cash industry it has become but I really care about making a difference, helping put a smile on a kid's face and playing games. That and also traveling, as I've never been to Africa.

The principle is very simple: £10 donated = 1 football going to kids in Africa in places they don't have any to play with. It might not change the world, but regardless. Playing with a brand new ball and kicking it about will change the experience of life for a kid, even if only a moment.

Do you remember how excited you were as a kid when playing and kicking a ball around? That or whatever else you enjoyed playing with. We're going to give lots of balls around to kids in Tanzania, as well as meet up with NGOs and charities out there working with kids and who could use a few brand new footballs.

Neil, through whom I also found out The Great Football Giveaway in the first place, wrote a post a couple of weeks ago announcing he was pulling a team together to raise funds. Sounded very exciting. After consideration and checking that such a trip was pretty unreasonable given I a few other things going on, I chucked out the reasons not to go ahead out of the way and committed.

Now we have a team of eight talented and smart people from the advertising and media industry joining up for this amazing adventure. We are starting to organise the whole thing and will be actively raising funds for the trip as well as making contacts both with potential sponsors for balls and organisations operating out in Tanzania we could meet up with.

The plan at this stage is to go from Dar Es Salaam (Departing from London on Thursday 4th Nevember) to the Southeast of Tanzania which apparently is off the tourist trail, has the most undeveloped and poorest parts of the country. We will choose a town as a base somewhere and spider out from there on 4x4s to go and give out footballs.

We have just set up a JustGiving Page so you go ahead and start donating:

http://www.justgiving.com/Tanzania2010

Our target is to raise £13,500 for 1,350 footballs.

We are also looking at organising a fundraising event in London mid October; more news on that very soon. If you have any contacts for potential sponsors or NGOs / Charities / peopl in Tanzania, please keep in touch.

Spiderman: Web of Shadows

I just came across the trailer of a new Spiderman video game, apparently coming out in October this year. Apart from the very cool fact that you can see a symbiote infested Wolverine in the video, I checked the website for the game and I thought it looked pretty cool as well, check it out.

I like the map navigation system with goodies to unlock, but what's even more surprising and really intriguing is that it claims that members of the website community can influence aspects of the design and development of the video game, which I think is very cool.
I haven't fully looked into it, but as I understand, players will have a lot of freedom of choice in the game and are reflecting that in this campaign, apparently people could lastly vote for the artwork featured on the Xbox 360 game packaging and before that people chose the model who would be playing Mary-Jane in the game.

Good example of interactivity and involving the users in the creation of the product. I would call that an interesting example of Wikinomics applied to the video games industry. I wonder how many people are registered on the website. I checked the site forums and there are over 6,000 posts in total; I don't know when the site was launched, but it sounds pretty healthy for a video game site.

That said, the game strangely looks much alike another I came across, whom apparently everyone is talking about these days; namely [Prototype]. You can view the trailer for the game here. Also set in New-York and and apparently completely open world, where the player is pretty much free to roam as they please. I'll have to check what they're doing for their online campaign...

The Great Football Giveaway

This is an amazingly inspiring project and a very moving video. The idea is simple: "No kid should be denied the chance to kick a ball about. It ’s one of life’s most simple pleasures." The project is to give away 3000 footballs to kids in Africa, it costs £10 - I just gave them two balls, go and give one out!

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I read about it first from Neil's blog.