America SCORES Seattle had an overflowing storage space of used soccer gear accumulated from past years of program. And this summer, we found a great home for it.
We've connected locally with two charities working with kids in Ghana. The first, called the Valued Girls Project, began as a way to help middle school-aged girls develop soccer skills to hopefully obtain scholarships to high school. In Ghana, school is free until our equivalent of high school. Many girls are forced to drop out of school and end up living on the streets or getting married at 14 or 15 and living the same disadvantaged lives of their mothers. High school is extremely pricey for families living on about $5 a day. The VGP has morphed into more than just soccer teams--it now offers computer literacy classes and soccer camps with math, reading and science classes. Now the project serves 100 kids ages 7 through 19 in much the same vein as SCORES--combining soccer and literacy training to give kids a well-rounded set of skills for life. There's also a boys team, which named themselves the SCORES of VGP after the SCORES logos on their jerseys!
Click on the image to read the letter to SCORES from the boys' coach:
Interested in helping out the Valued Girls Project? Contact Linda Thompson, Director, Education Initiative for Africa at lpthoompson@thevillagenet.org
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