“I am thankful to The FBA and CAC for giving me an opportunity to learn about such social organizations that are actively doing great work making football a medium for changing the lives of millions of people.”
From the South Asian country of Nepal, it has really been an amazing journey in The Football Business Academy. The passion in football from my early childhood was always knocking the door for a career in it. I left my job as a program officer in an NGO to chase my dream to learn and be a part of the professional career in the football industry; that’s when I joined The FBA in September 2019. Thanks to The FBA I got a 3-month internship at Coaches Across Continents (CAC), a global NGO, which finished just before the holidays.
Coaches Across Continents is an award-winning non-profit organization which functions in 6 continents and more than 112 countries around the world. The organization cooperates with governments, foundations, brands, INGOs and community based organizations to create legacies based on UN sustainable Development goals. From its four divisions – Influence, Innovate, Impact and Instruct – the whole function operates.
The major program is based on education outside the classroom from purposeful play, where the leaders or the participants are trained about different awareness programs. The programs are mainly based on bringing positive social changes to the community. Health and rights, child rights, life skills awareness programs, education to children, equality and equity in the community are some of the major areas that CAC have been functioning.
During my internship I like how they function. There are staff around the world and they communicate in a workplace which is similar to that of Facebook. The flow of information, roles and responsibilities, divisions of works and documentation were intact. Sharing ideas, information and reporting a project in the same place made it easier to operate for everybody, and easy for the organization to function. I am really impressed with team formation and the cooperation of the staff inside each team.
I worked as an intern in CL 17 Influence, which means Creating Legacies in 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As part of this, I updated the database of organizations for possible future partners for CAC. My mentor, Brain Suskiewicz who is a Chief Strategist at CAC, helped me to know about similar organizations. I learned so much about the value of sports for social changes as it binds people together and is easy for people to understand new things with the help of sports and mainly football.
There were 100s of football games for the awareness programs as per the target people where the football field / ground is the teaching area.
Due to the pandemic’s travel restrictions, I couldn’t travel and experience on field programs. The programs were also limited in 2020, which is why I was suggested to prepare a report on the Social Return on Investment. SROI is an analysis about the social value generated from a program. For the last one and half month, I worked on the SROI analysis report of Pathfinder International and Coaches Across Continents, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights SRHR program Zanzibar and Tanzania, 2019. It was a challenging mission but one which ended up being very valuable to CAC as well as for my personal development.
I am thankful to The FBA and CAC for giving me an opportunity to learn about such social organizations that are actively doing great work making football a medium for changing the lives of millions of people. I got an opportunity to build a strong network with people from different development fields, INGOs, and foundations. This network will definitely help me in my further career. Currently, I am actively seeking for my full career start in the football industry which I am extremely excited about.
Rabi is a Alumnus of The FBA’s Professional Master in Football Business 5th Edition. He can be contacted via LinkedIn.
