In the last 6 months CoolPlay have battled hard to raise what we need to deliver our 2016 program in 30 schools across the Western Cape, but we did it! We love what we do, and the response has been overwhelming, which means we see CoolPlay expanding massively in the next few years. In order for us to grow confidently, we need to produce a short video to help us tell our story. We think this will make it much easier to raise the kind of funds to help us achieve our long term vision.
CoolPlay is an innovative sports training programme which provides a framework to integrate valuable life-skills into sports training sessions. Last year we delivered over 600 life-skills sessions, at 10 schools across the Western Cape. In 2016, we hope to reach over 1000 kids, in 30 schools, and train 15 new coaches. Our aim is to spread how game changing work across the country, and for that we need better tools to exchange what we do with the world.
Who are we
CoolPlay is a Not For Profit (NPO) Trust. We have a board of volunteer trustees, a management committee, a manager and over 15 CoolPlay Coaches, lead by former Currie Cup player Sandile India (pictured)
CoolPlay was born in a rugby programme called Vuka which aims to awaken rugby in the townships. Vuka has been primarily funded by the SA Rugby Legends. The Vuka trustees and Laureus Sport for Good Foundation encouraged us to look at setting up a life-skills programme. With the support and funding of The Learning Trust the trustees went into partnership with Lindy Bruce from Cool To Be Me. Alongside Steph Nel, a consultant to World Rugby and SARU, they wrote the CoolPlay Way manual.
CoolPlay have been delivering programs at schools using this manual since 2014.
Our milestones
We are generously supported by a number of partner organisations, that you can find here.
But CoolPlay is growing quickly, and to compete for funding in a digital age we need the right donor materials – this campaign aims to raise up to R30,000 to produce a series of promotional videos that gets to the heart of what CoolPlay is about. With an edited selection of our amazing work, and with our best people in front of camera, we hope that we can raise even more money, so that we can keep doing what we do, but even bigger and better.
We need a minimum of R10 000 to shoot and edit for one day – enough to make a basic video, but ideally to cover all our media, donor and training needs, we would like to push for two or even three days.
The video will be produced by Shaun Swingler at Chronicle, the media partner to news outlets such as the Daily Maverick.
The CoolPlay Trust is a rag-tag of former athletes, corporate administrators and wanted-to-be-but-couldn’t sports stars who share a belief that sport has the power to change things for the better.
‘We believe that CoolPlay has the potential to shape the sportsmen and women of our future into powerful agents of change by using the sport that they love to become great players and even greater people.’
Barry O’Mahony | Founder
Our guiding hand is Johan Schlebusch, who can be reached at johan.g.schlebusch@gmail.com
Our coaching team is lead by Sandile India and Brendon Hamman.
Scott Sloan is a communications volunteer with CoolPlay since 2015. By day, he is a consultant with The Business Place in Philippi.