Monkey Sports

Mission - Improve the social and emotional well-being of children aged between 9-13 years old. 

Vision - We envision a world in which all children receive relevant and adequate support to enable them to attain an excellent education.

Values -  Inclusion, Respect, Fairness.

As the team is small, the team lead is involved in managing multiple facets of the organization such as training and monitoring, research, creating curriculum, managing day-to-day operations and generating revenue for the organization. 

The organization has been in existence for the last four years. However, the first three were doing projects without a theory of change and without indicators. After realizing the importance of following a structure and creating indicators to measure impact, we piloted our program just last year. 

As a team, we have understood the importance of measuring the impact of our work and this year our number one priority is to create indicators to measure the effectiveness of our work. The team even spends time learning a course from MIT JPAL Course. However, we realized that the team needs more hands-on support.

Three team members Director, Project Coordinator and the community youth leader will be involved in the Leap Project. The director will be attending the online course and then discussing and strategising it with the team to take a cost-effective and pragmatic way to implement it. 

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Using social-emotional learning-based sports programs to build coping skills in children to deal with stressful situations

A survey conducted by our initiative shows that  70% of marginalised children faced neglect, violence, and abuse at home because of poverty. The stressor increases the amygdala associated with fear and aggression and deteriorates the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with learning, memory and decision-making. 

Children are not motivated and focused to learn in the classroom leading to absenteeism, low academic outcomes, and showcasing anti-social behaviour such as engaging in smoking and drinking at a young age. 

To solve this problem we have designed a Sangwari program.  Sangwari is a Chattisgarhi word which means friend. Through this program, we train community youth on listening and empathy skills so that they are better able to understand the needs of children.  

After the training, the community youth start conducting regular Social Emotional Learning based sports-based sports programs building coping skills in children to help them deal with stressful situations.  Physical activity changes the structure of the brain associated with better learning and memory and social-emotional learning helps children apply the prefrontal cortex to manage their emotions and make better decisions. 

It is a community-based program for children aged between 9-13 years for a duration of 11 months. 

Case studies

We have conducted case studies for different stakeholders such as children, parents, teachers and the school principal. Stakeholders have reported an increase in motivation to go to school, an increase in school attendance, and an increase in class participation because of our work.

Literature Review

We have spent time doing a literature review to find the relationship between physical activity and the structure of the brain. Physical activity releases happy hormones and decreases the stress hormone cortisol which affects learning ability.

Social Emotional Learning program has been shown to improve academic outcomes by 11 %.

Questionnaire 

We have also conducted a Social Emotional Learning Questionnaire on topics such as problem-solving and communication. It was a simple baseline -an online questionnaire to be conducted at the beginning and end of the interventions. 

To measure the problem skills in children because of our intervention we were asking one single question to children “What can you do with a brick “. The purpose of asking the question was to see how much children are able to apply themselves and think of different solutions in case of facing problems.  However, the indicator did not provide any useful insight to help us learn whether children are learning from our intervention.   

For communication, it was based on the observation by the facilitator who put children in one of the four groups - passive, passive-aggressive,  aggressive and assertive. We did see some changes at the end of the intervention but are not sure about its validity. 

Literature reviews helped us find evidence to validate and design the required intervention using sports and social-emotional learning on children's learning abilities. 

The questionnaire helped us to understand that conducting and analyzing indicators are resource-intensive activities. Relying on general observation does not provide correct measures and indicators to inform us. For example, to find if problem skills in children are improving or not through the intervention, we may need to first identify how problem-solving looks in different stages and come up with a comprehensive list of indicators to see if children are making progress in the right direction. 

Measuring behavioural change in children is subject to bias and therefore using external surveyors to collect data or record information can be useful. 

Also, we need to involve all the team members in the planning and strategizing of creating these indicators. It will help to keep everyone on the same page and to understand the importance of using indicators to measure the success of work. 

Motivation- It is very difficult to see tangible outputs of social-emotional skills and therefore the need to observe and notice small changes is important to keep ourselves motivated that we are moving in the right direction.

Course Correction -The evidence will help us to regularly course-correct our work. 

Fundraising  - Philanthropists, and donors have increasingly started to ask for evidence to showcase the impact of work. 

Increasing the scale of our work - It will help us to scale our work in different regions.

Global Recognition -  Getting scientific validity will help us get global recognition and be a part of literature reviews and interest of other social-emotional learning programs. 

• How children are applying the skills in their life that they have learned during the session.

• How an improvement in mood and well-being is related to motivation and learning.  

• Can the intervention of year work be long-lasting in children’s lives? Are the behaviour changes permanent? 

• Creating an exhaustive list of questionnaires for different stages of progress of social-emotional skills. For example, how can we measure whether the oral communication skills of children are improving or not looking at diffrent scenarios during the session, while interacting with peers, in the school and how it differs for introverts and extroverts? How do we measure the progress of children through the list?

• Creating a common Excel sheet to collect data from the field. How the Excel sheet can be used by different facilitators to collect the data. How can the data be analyzed collectively to measure the impact of the work?

• Creating a training manual of lists of DOs and DONTs for conducting surveys with children. Conducting a survey is open to bias such as asking a leading question, and creating a training manual and conducting training will provide preventive measures to be more objective.

• Creating a timeline during which the research will be conducted. During which period of the program can the questions be asked or can the changes be observed?

• Our next cohort will start in the month of June 2023 and continue till April 2024. As the Leapathon project will end by December, we can use the outputs for the program for the next year or if possible start at the end quarter to test it.

• The outputs will be an integral part of the program and organization impacting decision-making and the progress of our work. 

• We will start providing training to our employees so that we are ready to implement it by next year.

• The outputs will be used at different stages of the progress of the program.

Short-term Outcomes

• It will help us measure the impact of our work and help us in making better decisions to course-correct our work.

• It will help us to take a more structured and objective approach to our program. 

• Better articulation of the problem, solution and the impact of our work. 

Long-Term Outcomes

• Oppurtutnuites for organizations to work in different regions. As impact metrics will help us to monitor the program effectively,

• Better fundraising as showcasing the impact of our work will help us to attract more donors.