How we go beyond sport
At Beyond Sport, we believe sport is a powerful catalyst for social change. By partnering with organizations, communities and individuals, we work to scale sport’s impact across the globe through programs that promote collective action on society’s most pressing challenges.
Our holistic approach combines local engagement with strategic partnerships, ensuring our efforts are impactful and sustainable. By making the global local, we tailor our work to align with the unique challenges of each environment, strengthening the sector and building resilient organizations.
We are committed to innovation and excellence, using data-driven insights and research to stay at the forefront of the latest developments in the field. By continuously seeking creative ways to leverage sport, we develop scalable solutions that can be adapted across different contexts, creating a world where sport drives opportunity, equity and community.
Understanding Communities
Beyond Sport prioritizes listening and empathy, focusing on the needs of the populations we serve. We work closely with nonprofit organizations, funders and other partners to make sure our efforts maximize positive social impact.
We use comprehensive research and mapping to understand on-the-ground complexities, identify themes and gaps and engage experts to inform strategy. By understanding the current landscape and surveying our connections, we can customize our approach to be relevant to the community. We then conduct needs analysis and feasibility studies, speaking to our networks and partners on how to best address local realities.
Leveraging our extensive knowledge and trusted connections, we strategically match funder objectives with partner needs. This ensures our initiatives are well-informed and effectively address the challenges faced by the people we support.
Aligning Support
Beyond Sport believes in a comprehensive model that includes both funding and development platforms to strengthen communities and the sport sector overall. We use progressive approaches like unrestricted funding and participatory grantmaking. Our quality control and approval processes, managed globally, ensure credible handling of large funds.
We also know it’s important to support strong people, ideas and organizations. Leveraging our trusted network and global footprint, Beyond Sport brings top-tier capacity-building opportunities to the table. These include interactive workshops, coaches’ training, educational events and interactive learning communities. We host expert talks, foster multi-sector collaboration and provide forums for organizations to make connections and share their work and experiences.
We also provide guidance to enhance organizational resilience, leadership skills and sustainability. This includes advice on systems, procedures and policies like safeguarding, exploitation prevention and best practices in governance.
Telling the Story
At Beyond Sport, we highlight sport’s potential to uplift communities, influence policy and transform lives. Through multimedia campaigns we spotlight our partner and program successes to motivate and engage a global audience.
Across our digital platforms, Beyond Sport shares the work of community organizations with tens of thousands of people, helping organizations increase their reach, expand their influence and forge connections.
Additionally, we work with our entire network including grantees, corporate partners and advocates to amplify these stories and inspire new partners to join the movement.
Learning & Adapting
We continuously evaluate and evolve our work, making real-time adjustments and learning from our experiences to improve our programs and processes. By creating program models that provide international partners with broad measurement and reporting tools and local groups with context-specific solutions, we ensure our initiatives tackle global problems with local actions. We develop systems for measuring impact at both individual and group levels, analyzing this data to adapt our program delivery as needed.
To gain further insights, we hold focus groups and solicit feedback from our beneficiary groups, allowing us to learn directly from them.
Our Network
Beyond Sport is proud to bring diverse organizations together to build strong communities and effect real change. Our global network of more than 1,500 nonprofits and NGOs enables us to make a powerful impact through partnerships, knowledge sharing and a focus on community.
We go beyond funding to help scope and scale programs, support capacity-building, share resources and empower organizations to maximize their impact. Our network brings together experts across a broad range of social issues and disciplines – from youth empowerment to coaching through a mental health lens to using sport to promote inclusion – to work toward common goals.
Combined with our team, league and social enterprises partnerships, Beyond Sport supports the work of individuals and organizations addressing key issues in more than 150 countries. Uniting such diverse experiences, expertise and reach creates stronger, people-first solutions to the problems we all face.
Through Beyond Sport’s support, we’ve changed our organizational vision. It’s become bolder. We want to end intergenerational poverty and ultimately reach more people and change more lives.
Rob Malengreau, Founder & President of UMRio (Brazil)