Sport Cambodia Project #21699

Empower 1,000 Cambodian Kids Through Sport

by Globalteer

Project Report | Feb 23, 2021
New Year, New Connections

By Jenny Byrne | Fundraising & Communications Officer

The children learn the importance of warm ups

Back in November, we were getting back into the swing of things, offering sports lessons and weekly football matches to the students at our Helping Hands School. They have been enjoying the variety of drills and games designed to help improve flexibility, strength and endurance, especially when they get to take the lead! Continuing the roller coaster, a new wave of Covid-19 cases prompted the government to shut the schools down again for December, but thankfully it didn’t last long this time! The program is back up and running, both at Helping Hands and, as of the beginning of February, in the wider area.

New Collaborations

We started 2021 with a welcome new arrival: our new Sports Project Manager, Jared Cahners. He’s well known as “the Frisbee Guy” in Siem Reap for organizing weekly ultimate frisbee games and he speaks Khmer (the local language), which makes him the perfect person for the job! Jared got stuck straight in, meeting with government schools to try to extend the reach of our program. We’ve got 6 primary schools onboard for this year and are working to get secondary schools involved soon. Physical education and sporting activities are not generally available through government schools, but with our team running regular sessions at different facilities, we will be able to promote healthy, active lifestyles and teach important skills to many more students.

Goals for Girls

Our Goals for Girls initiative, which promotes gender equality and female empowerment through sport, is also back up and running. From October, coaches were delivering sessions to 10 girls just from the Helping Hands School, but with other schools reopening, we have been inviting girls from the wider area to join and are already up to 15 participants. Through these workshops, we have witnessed these young women grow in confidence and start to use their voices. Several students have become outspoken with their opinions on gender roles, and have expressed a desire to achieve a higher level of education than that of their parents.

We couldn’t do this without your generosity, so thank you for your continued support. We’re excited to see how our projects and collaborations continue to grow over the coming months and to share more news soon!

Please keep in mind the upcoming Little-by-Little Campaign which will run from 8^th to 12^th March. GlobalGiving will 50% match every donation under $50 received during that week, and will also match any new recurring donations! We know times are hard, but if you do wish to donate, doing so between 8^th and 12^th March will help your generosity to go even further. Please share our project with friends and family, to help us to empower even more Cambodian children through sports.

Our "Goals for Girls" Team

Our new Sports Project manager - Jared Cahners

Links:

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Feb 6, 2018
New year and positive changes at Helping Hands

By Sita ter Horst | Helping Hands Program Manager

Lap teaches our volunteer-students First-Aid!

After the bustling and busy times that the end-of-year always brings, plus the excitement of settling into our new school, things at Helping Hands are now slowly getting into a mellow flow. This has given us time to reflect, process and make room for some very positive changes in the new year!

Final building is done!
We are excited to announce that the last building of our new school is finalized: the new kitchen!

Thanks to our generous donors Saga Charitable Trust Foundation and Brian Kuhl, who funded the new kitchen build, we now have a wonderful big space for preparing our students' breakfasts. The new kitchen also includes two secure storage rooms, so that we can store valuable school materials!

2018: Empowerment at full blast
At the beginning of this year, we’ve had to say goodbye to our very much-loved Project Coordinator Nang, who was with us for three years, but has now embarked on new adventures. Although we are very sad to see Nang leave, his departure has made it possible to promote someone else into his role; someone who we believe is more than ready for this amazing opportunity - our very own English Teacher Sopheap! Sopheap, born and raised in the village, started out as Helping Hands’ very first young English teacher with little experience but big determination and eagerness to learn. In the 10 years that followed, Sopheap has grown out into a phenomenal teacher, active community member and he is a born leader, empowering his own and the younger generation to improve their lives in the village. His story is one of the most successful ones in the history of Helping Hands – and he is the perfect person to now finally fill the shoes of coordinating Helping Hands, alongside our Globalteer management team.

Empowering the villagers and building up the dignity of the community as a whole has always been Helping Hands objective and strength. Alongside Sopheap, also Sister Rhi, our gardener, has been able to fulfil a new position. Rhi - who, when starting out at Helping Hands a few years ago - couldn’t read or write and still had lots to learn in farming, has now become literate, grows the most delicious veggies in the region (we believe!;) – all because of her urge to learn, grow and develop – taking on all learning opportunities that Helping Hands could offer her. That is why now, Rhi has proudly taken on the very important responsibility of coordinating our breakfast program.

We are 100% certain that both Rhi and Sopheap will shine in their new roles.

Fun learning is productive learning!
We can all agree - when we are having fun, we learn much better and faster. Especially for young children, who only have a 10 to 15 minutes concentration span, it is important to keep having fun during their classes – to keep up their attention and remember better what they learn. That is why, we’ve been encouraging more and more creativity into the classroom and organising fun days for our students, where the main goal is: to have fun! Just before Christmas, we had a Christmas crafts day organised by some of our long-term volunteers, and we are now organising a soccer tournament, which will take place in March.

Increasing Student-Teacher time
Now that we have more classroom space and our teacher team is complete – we can finally increase our student-teacher time and make creativity a permanent part of our curriculum. That is why we have recently introduced weekly ‘extra-classes’. Every Monday, all students receive one extra hour of class, and to empower our teachers to use more creativity in their own lessons, Arts is one of the three subjects for the extra classes, alongside Khmer Literacy and Mathematics.

Helping Hands Alumni giving back!
Do you remember our Grade 9 students who graduated in November? We are very happy to announce that five of them have come back to Helping Hands, volunteering every day after school in our library - keeping it clean and tidy, helping the younger students with their homework or reading with them. One of the volunteer-students is now shadowing our Social Worker a few days a week when she does home visits, and in the future some of them will spend more time in the classroom assisting our teachers with their classes.

Another great success that we want to share is that Lap, one of our Scholarship Students will graduate this month from his University course of Nursing and Midwifery! In between the end of his classes and his final exam, he also wanted to give back to Helping Hands – so he spent the month of January volunteering at with us, training our five volunteer-students in First Aid and tidying up our first aid box and supplies.

In line with our vision of empowering the villagers to help themselves, creating opportunities like these are immensely important. The hands-on experience these volunteer-students - who still have three years to go until they finish high school - will gain from working with us, will give them the opportunity to explore different working fields and have good job opportunities in the future.

Small donations for Big Impact
As you may know, Helping Hands’ work can only continue with the help of generous donors like you! We are currently in big need of donations to be able to continue helping our village.

No matter how small your contribution or donation, here in Cambodia it can make a huge impact in the lives of our students.

We know that some of our supporters don’t have the opportunity to fundraise or give big amounts – and that is why we want to encourage more small, but sustainable giving!

You can already get involved by becoming a monthly donor for just a small amount. An amount as small as a dollar will already make a difference!

A big thank you to all of our supporters and donors – who make it possible for us to continue empowering, helping and teaching here in Cambodia.

Extra class on Monday: Arts & Crafts!

Rhi in the garden with two Food&Farming volunteers

Our final building is done: the kitchen!

Making Christmas crafts on Fun Day!

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May 9, 2016
End of season report for Cambodia Sport

By Simon Hare | Development Director, Globalteer

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