Disability Sports and Partnerships
I recently attended and spoke at the graduation at Adarsha Vidya Mandir Higher Secondary School (AVM) of six Coaching for Fun (C4F) participants. This is a coaching training program for wheelchair basketball, a program of the NGO ENGAGE which promotes empowerment and inclusion for youth living with disabilities through volunteerism and service. ENGAGE builds new relationships, changing society’s attitudes by developing new skills and competencies and promoting advocacy actions.
I spoke to the graduates of what I called Experiential Empathy, i.e. how we come to the point of wanting, based on our experiences with others, to do something more in the world than just having a job and making money. For me and hopefully the graduates, this could be about taking the knowledge and experience from having coached persons with physical disability to play basketball to being able to be more empathetic towards others creating greater impact in the world.
Roman Krznaric in his article the Six Habits of Highly Empathetic People asks what is empathy? He explains, it’s the ability to step into the shoes of another person, aiming to understand their feelings and perspectives, and to use that understanding to guide our actions. That makes it different from kindness or pity. And don’t confuse it with the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you—they might have different tastes.” Empathy is about discovering those tastes.[1]
The ENGAGE coaches have taken their passion for basketball and turned it into reaching out to helping those with physical disability to participate in not only sports but also providing opportunities for more activity participation.
ENGAGE cannot accomplish its mission without partnering. This starts with persons with physical disability who want opportunities to participate fully and then goes to the numerous volunteers, most of whom are in school/college, wanting to coach, gain office experience through an internship, etc. ENGAGE provides a platform for bringing all of these people together.
There are also other NGOs working in the area of disability who through partnering could help to create a larger impact. But there must be a strong will to partner. Next there are the donors who believe in the mission and may want to help create a more inclusive society through funding the agency. But finding donors who will help to consistently sustain the mission is not always easy.
One of the future activities which ENGAGE is working on is a basketball league, starting in Kathmandu, for persons with disability. This platform will provide a consistent means for the players to participate and continue to demonstrate how persons with physical disability are no different than anyone else, except that maybe they have to use a wheelchair to be mobile or have a ball that makes noise for those playing site impaired cricket.
This a perfect opportunity to partner in a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activity. A corporate(s) could get a great deal of positive publicity and good will from sponsoring this league, even going further by hiring people with disability to work in their organization, leading towards workplace inclusion. Corporate employees could also volunteer in the league to possibly do some coaching, refereeing and other activities. The volunteers would be trained and could learn more empathy through experiencing working with people with disability. This could lead to the corporate culture becoming more empathetic possibly branching out to the wider society leading towards inclusion.
This is all a circle, the more that we put ourselves in other’s shoes (or in this case a wheelchair) the further we can go in collaborating. It’s never about us as individuals, but is about how we engage in the world, how we put energy into partnering with others to make things better for all.
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