Soccer into the Streets has redirected its resources away from the development of life skills through soccer to supporting education and the delivery of food and groceries to those in need.
Extract from USA Today article:
“In Atlanta, there is no soccer being played in low-income neighborhoods these days in Phil Hill’s Soccer in the Streets program. The organization instead is serving hot lunches to 1,000 children over several weeks. It has also started an online program to help 200 children with creative writing, reading and drawing assignments. After they finish, they receive a soccer skills video from their coach. If the kids don’t have access to a laptop, one of the coaches will go over the lessons with them on the phone.
Hill has also been delivering groceries on the hard-hit west side of Atlanta. As he started unloading packages of food out of his SUV recently at an apartment complex, a girl came up to him and spotted a stash of soccer balls in his car.
“Can I have a ball?” she asked. He gave her one. “She was off with this thing,” he said. “I’ve never seen a smile so big on an 11-year-old’s face.” Word quickly got out in the apartment complex. “Another kid popped out, and another kid,” Hill said. “It spread like wildfire. In the space of 10 minutes, I had all these kids around, trying to keep them at a safe distance. It was just the power of a ball. Some of them didn’t want to use it for soccer, they wanted it for basketball, but who cares? I had 24 soccer balls in the back of my car. I gave them all away.”
“Two months ago, we were just in the soccer business,” he said. “Now, we’re in the logistics business. We’re in the food business. We’re in the education business. For us, it was just a case of retooling what we did. It actually honed us in more on our mission, which always has been about how we can use soccer to help kids in low-income neighborhoods.”