One All- transforming youth through an empowered worldview

One All is a registered non-profit organization that works with adolescents at schools and communities in Chennai and Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu India to teach life skill education through mixed-gender sports. 

Goals: We believe in providing life skills such as identity building, understanding feelings, conflict resolution, empathy building, nurturing interpersonal relationships and awareness about gender stereotypes to develop children’s ability to make informed choices.

Background: Youth in India, especially from underserved communities, face challenges due to societal norms, peer pressure, gender bias and influence from media that shapes their ideas and behaviors. Substance abuse among men is high (40%) and often adolescents as young as 13-year olds start getting into the habit, mainly due to peer pressure. There is a lack of mentors and role models that can teach social values to the youth. The average age for marriage is 17 for girls and 20 for boys. There is tremendous social pressure on adolescents to get married at a young age. College-going girls are often stigmatized by the community for being unmarried; yet they cannot meet with male classmates. A girl in our program had to drop out from school because of her family and community’s lack of interest in her growth. These studies and observations highlight the lack of exposure to help identity building, of information about physical maturity/sexuality, of mental maturity and of mentors. Life skill education is not taught by schools or community members. Starting families at a young age leads to the vicious cycle of teen marriage and gender inequality in education. There is a pressing need to bridge this gap in conventional education systems and help the youth to build strong values based on informed choices. We have developed a sport-based life skill curriculum that acts as a supplement to the overall identity development of young people by aiming to break stereotypes and overcome gender biases.

Actions: Our organization ‘One All’ uses sport (specifically Ultimate Frisbee), as a tool to run life skill education programs. Ultimate Frisbee is a mixed-gender, self-refereed and non-contact sport. We run after-school and during-school life skill sessions for youth and work with adolescents to provide exposure to the above mentioned topics. We facilitate discussions so that they find their own answers and build their own values. We started our NGO in October 2016. Since then, we have worked with over 200 children between the ages of 13 to 17 at 3 government schools and 1 private school last year and in Doomingkuppam, one of the biggest fishing communities in Chennai.”