Helping each other to thrive

Partnering with The Ideas Partnership

This month we have been thinking quite a bit about our partners and the importance of partnerships to our mission as an organization. As we mentioned in our post “living up to our principles” on 5 October, working as a collective is the only way we can make a lasting and deep impact on people’s lives.

So we thought that we would have a closer look at a partner PLAY has been working with in Kosovo for almost 10 years now: The Ideas Partnership or TIP.

PLAY's 20th Anniversary celebration in October 2019 was also a chance to celebrate our partnership with TIP and others

As an organization, TIP is a great showcase for the benefits of a sport for development approach. One of its areas of work involves running Learning Centers to provide education, health, welfare and other services to vulnerable children and their families. With these core activities taking place in a central location inside communities in Fushë Kosovë / Kosovo Polje and Janjevë / Janjevo, PLAY has been working in close collaboration to enrich TIP’s work. 

This has taken different forms over the years with the support of donors such as the Austrian Development Agency and UNDP:

1. Working with mixed-ethnic youth in the locality surrounding the learning centers to build bridges, create dialogue and build their skills as sport animators, who in turn run inclusive activities for vulnerable children;
2. Introducing socio-sport activities in nearby schools which TIP works hand-in-hand with to support vulnerable and disadvantaged children;
3. Running sport-based community events such as “mini-marathons” that integrate children from schools, learning centers and the wider community;
4. Enhancing the Learning Center curriculum with games and activities which encourage core values such as respect, cooperation and living together.

In turn, by partnering with TIP, PLAY has been able to link its own beneficiaries to broader opportunities for learning and development and access new audiences and beneficiaries through the Learning Centers and community activities TIP provides.

PLAY & TIP's partnership has also provided opportunities to enrich other initiatives - in 2019 a group of physical education students from France came to Kosovo with PLAY and had the chance to work with TIPs Learning Center beneficiaries to run extra curricular sports activities.

Together and in partnership therefore, TIP and PLAY have been able to have a much deeper impact on people’s lives than they could working alone. In 2019, while celebrating PLAY’s 20-year anniversary, we spoke to TIPs founder Elizabeth Gowing and she captured this idea perfectly: 

“through PLAY’s initiatives we have been able to offer a richer mix of opportunities to the beneficiaries we have...”

As we look to the future with more joint projects on the horizon, we celebrate the impact of partnership work and the important central role it plays in our organizations strategy. May our partnership continue to thrive in the coming years!