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In Los Angeles, systems change starts locally
Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States, and LA County comprises 88 cities. Divide that into the number of neighborhoods with different needs, and you have a very varied community to serve. Despite these complexities, one issue that the most under-resourced people share in LA County is the lack of parks and opportunities for sport and play; plus recess isn’t mandated in the vast majority of schools.
So, in a place with an unmatched number of professional sports teams — the Dodgers, the Angels, the Kings, the Clippers; the list goes on — a huge number of young people, from largely Latino and Black communities, are without access to sports and the benefits it brings: health, team building, coaching, purpose, achievement, new experiences, and (for parents) child care. This is proven to impact girls in the area the most: according to a study by the Women’s Sports Foundation, young women have the highest dropout rate from sports, as many families can’t afford to send multiple children to programs and often rely on young women to act as essential caregiving support.
In response to this issue, the LA84 Foundation, formed in the wake of the 1984 Olympics in LA, created the Play Equity Fund (PEF) to “level the playing field” for access to sports, and establish the only nonprofit focused solely on “play equity” as a social justice issue. The team running the fund is unique in their approach: funding community, grassroots organizations that many philanthropies would not usually take a chance on. “We act as a convener and capacity builder, sharing research, convening, helping close gaps for grassroots organizations, and using our network insights and reach to change policies and systems,” says Play Equity Fund President, Renata Simril.
“The work we do for systems change — that’s not going to happen with one investment in one year. Come to us and put money in for five years and we’ll track the impact. If you want to have long-term impact and lift up BIPOC organizations, look at these changemaker intermediaries.”
Put grassroots first
PEF has helped drive key data to prove the impact of physical activity on mental wellness and the ability for communities to thrive. “We did a three-year longitudinal study that shows how sports participation encourages kids to stay in school longer, and also accelerates their English language skills when they engage in sports. But the data also showed that the gap had grown wider for most low-income kids’ ability to access sports,” said Simril. To reach the most kids, PEF has focused on supporting after-school programs that work with some of the six million kids in the California public school system.
PEF started with a coalition of grantees across Southern CA — listening and learning about what they needed to survive and flourish. “It was clear what was needed was capacity building to graduate from being small mom-and-pop organizations to stronger nonprofits,” said Simril.
Youth ‘N Motion in Leimert Park, CA is a great example of this nurturing approach. Through martial arts, the nonprofit was originally helping 25 young Black men who came from low-income neighborhoods and were at risk of becoming part of the youth incarceration system. “Our first grant to them was around $5,000,” said Simril. “Most funders won’t make grants that small to organizations of their size. We wanted to take a risk on this underdog. Eight years later, Youth ‘N Motion just received a $150k grant from a larger philanthropy, helping them expand to archery, and dance; and they serve hundreds of kids.”
Simril explains their flexibility in building capacity. “We bring the infrastructure they need to raise awareness but don’t know how to speak to the press, surface expert trends on mental wellness — whatever they need, we offer, to help them build capacity to serve more kids.”
Fernando Ramirez, Chief Policy and Public Affairs Officer at LA84 Foundation/Play Equity Fund explained the unique mindset: “I see it as ‘we work for these organizations.’ In each of those categories we have added resources or supported policy changes that unlock resources, space, and coaches.”
“Win, lose, try again”
Lindsay "Abdul Latif" Ferguson grew up in South Central LA. “Being a low-income area, there were gangs and things like that [while I was living and playing in the area]. When I first started martial arts it was basically to be able to defend myself,” he says. The more he practiced, the better he got, and he quickly became a national champion, traveling to Thailand to represent the U.S. “And this year I’m being inducted into the Hall of Fame!”
In 2005, Ferguson started a small nonprofit — Youth ‘N Motion Academy— to offer martial arts as an after-school program in his neighborhood; a chance to give back to the community and pass on the knowledge and value that he gained from his experience.
Ferguson is grateful to LA84/PEF for their unique role in supporting his organization in the early days. “They have been a huge benefit to us — Youth ‘N Motion Academy received its first grant from them. Their approach is very down to earth, very clear. With most nonprofit grants, you don’t get to meet the funder. With Renata and team, it's more hands-on, you can actually talk to them and resolve issues and go from there.”
Today, Ferguson is the Founder, President, and CEO of a growing organization that serves the Leimert Park area with karate and archery. “It’s majority African American, low-income kids. The biggest deterrent is kids don’t have access to sports and play, the ability to pay tuition, or to get to the classes. So we get funding to help pay for the kids’ tuition, tournament support, and equipment.”
Why does he do it? “The value is in their confidence level, their self-esteem, the overall fact of being able to compete, know what it is to win, lose, try again.”
Invest in trusted relationships
Renata Simril is a vocal advocate for larger or corporate philanthropies to trust intermediaries like PEF to help them work effectively deep within neighborhoods because those intermediaries can help bridge the gap between decision-makers and community voices. PEF now has reach into 50 organizations in Southern California — what they call their “Voices of Play Equity” — allowing funders to leverage their dollars to go deep in specific neighborhoods and impact hundreds or thousands of lives. Plus, those funds not only go directly to local programs; they also contribute to accelerating the community pressure that PEF harnesses to help inform local and state policy in favor of the communities they serve. For example, they recently worked to create the King County Play Equity Coalition which helped pass a recess bill in Seattle, and did the same in California, guaranteeing recess for elementary students.
“Funders need to open their dollars to intermediaries. We can help you go directly to an organization, or have a reach into the system of sport development. We can help you reach scale — reach hundreds of kids and those small BIPOC organizations at scale. And we will do the communications,” said Simril.
PEF put this intermediary role into action by partnering with Nike on a new initiative called ‘Made to Play’ in the Boyle Heights and Watts neighborhoods. The three-year, $1.3 million program aims to empower 13 community organizations to create equal access to play for Latina and Black girls.
“Nike asked to partner with us given our relationships on the ground and deep connections to this community – so we helped curate programs because of the trust we have here," said Simril. “Now we’re doing a second term with those organizations and creating a toolkit that can inform everyone involved in this type of work.”
Quote: Matt Geschke
The power of “opportunity influencers”
Derek Steele is the Executive Director of the Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI), a nonprofit that “exists to improve the overall health, education and wellbeing of youth and community of color by empowering them to enact the change they want to see” through research, training and community mobilization, in LA County and beyond. He is also the chair of the Care First Community Investment Advisory Committee that PEF works closely with to unlock resources for the sports based youth development sector.
“Young people don’t have a choice what family or community they were born into. But everything that is in that built environment has everything to do with their life outcomes — their ability to be school-ready, to be housed, to get a job. The social-emotional aspect — the health dynamics, is a place built for walkability, is it built for play?” said Steele.
Like PEF, Steele’s organization is focused on disrupting the cycles of concentrated disadvantage by creating what he calls “intentional randomness.” He explained: “Everyone has something random that changed things for them — the random math teacher that saw something in them that no one else did; the mom that made sure they had to go to soccer practice that meant that they ended up going on a summer trip to Europe. It’s random to that person, but it's intentional for the person giving the care. It’s the intention of the heart. We create an atmosphere so those things can happen, like through our Scholars Program.”
“The problems in South LA are not the same in Lancaster County or Long Beach. You have to have place-based strategies that help to provide the opportunity for those communities to come together and ideate on what the future looks like. The tools might be the same but the solutions are different.”
Care First Community Investment
In 2020, LA County approved Measure J which dedicated at least ten percent of the County’s locally generated unrestricted funds to address racial injustice and over-incarceration of Black and Brown communities. The money is meant to fund community investments; every year, $100 million is distributed to community programs from a “care first” standpoint.
A ‘Care First Investment Advisory Committee’ was established to oversee equitable distribution of those resources — a body of 24 people from all walks of life, chaired by Derek Steele for the last two years.
“That looks like nearly 345 organizations getting funding to elevate the work that they’re doing,” said Steele. “Now they can scale the impact of care in our community.”
For Tranche 3 of the funding, PEF led a large-scale community-driven process to make the case for funding to play equity-driven organizations. “We ran a 6-8 month campaign with community-attended meetings throughout the county — every concept that was submitted was eligible. PEF put together a leading program and submitted a concept for sport play and movement as a prevention to the criminal justice system, and won those organizations $15 million dollars,” said Fernando Ramirez.
The concept submitted by PEF was a demonstration of how on-the-ground, place-based intermediaries can make a huge difference to communities, by embedding equity into the process of funding: “We deconstructed the application process — we helped them apply for the money, guided them on what words to use,” said PEF leader Renata Simril.
In Los Angeles, systems change starts locally
Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States, and LA County comprises 88 cities. Divide that into the number of neighborhoods with different needs, and you have a very varied community to serve. Despite these complexities, one issue that the most under-resourced people share in LA County is the lack of parks and opportunities for sport and play; plus recess isn’t mandated in the vast majority of schools.
So, in a place with an unmatched number of professional sports teams — the Dodgers, the Angels, the Kings, the Clippers; the list goes on — a huge number of young people, from largely Latino and Black communities, are without access to sports and the benefits it brings: health, team building, coaching, purpose, achievement, new experiences, and (for parents) child care. This is proven to impact girls in the area the most: according to a study by the Women’s Sports Foundation, young women have the highest dropout rate from sports, as many families can’t afford to send multiple children to programs and often rely on young women to act as essential caregiving support.
In response to this issue, the LA84 Foundation, formed in the wake of the 1984 Olympics in LA, created the Play Equity Fund (PEF) to “level the playing field” for access to sports, and establish the only nonprofit focused solely on “play equity” as a social justice issue. The team running the fund is unique in their approach: funding community, grassroots organizations that many philanthropies would not usually take a chance on. “We act as a convener and capacity builder, sharing research, convening, helping close gaps for grassroots organizations, and using our network insights and reach to change policies and systems,” says Play Equity Fund President, Renata Simril.
“The work we do for systems change — that’s not going to happen with one investment in one year. Come to us and put money in for five years and we’ll track the impact. If you want to have long-term impact and lift up BIPOC organizations, look at these changemaker intermediaries.”
Put grassroots first
PEF has helped drive key data to prove the impact of physical activity on mental wellness and the ability for communities to thrive. “We did a three-year longitudinal study that shows how sports participation encourages kids to stay in school longer, and also accelerates their English language skills when they engage in sports. But the data also showed that the gap had grown wider for most low-income kids’ ability to access sports,” said Simril. To reach the most kids, PEF has focused on supporting after-school programs that work with some of the six million kids in the California public school system.
PEF started with a coalition of grantees across Southern CA — listening and learning about what they needed to survive and flourish. “It was clear what was needed was capacity building to graduate from being small mom-and-pop organizations to stronger nonprofits,” said Simril.
Youth ‘N Motion in Leimert Park, CA is a great example of this nurturing approach. Through martial arts, the nonprofit was originally helping 25 young Black men who came from low-income neighborhoods and were at risk of becoming part of the youth incarceration system. “Our first grant to them was around $5,000,” said Simril. “Most funders won’t make grants that small to organizations of their size. We wanted to take a risk on this underdog. Eight years later, Youth ‘N Motion just received a $150k grant from a larger philanthropy, helping them expand to archery, and dance; and they serve hundreds of kids.”
Simril explains their flexibility in building capacity. “We bring the infrastructure they need to raise awareness but don’t know how to speak to the press, surface expert trends on mental wellness — whatever they need, we offer, to help them build capacity to serve more kids.”
Fernando Ramirez, Chief Policy and Public Affairs Officer at LA84 Foundation/Play Equity Fund explained the unique mindset: “I see it as ‘we work for these organizations.’ In each of those categories we have added resources or supported policy changes that unlock resources, space, and coaches.”
Invest in trusted relationships
Renata Simril is a vocal advocate for larger or corporate philanthropies to trust intermediaries like PEF to help them work effectively deep within neighborhoods because those intermediaries can help bridge the gap between decision-makers and community voices. PEF now has reach into 50 organizations in Southern California — what they call their “Voices of Play Equity” — allowing funders to leverage their dollars to go deep in specific neighborhoods and impact hundreds or thousands of lives. Plus, those funds not only go directly to local programs; they also contribute to accelerating the community pressure that PEF harnesses to help inform local and state policy in favor of the communities they serve. For example, they recently worked to create the King County Play Equity Coalition which helped pass a recess bill in Seattle, and did the same in California, guaranteeing recess for elementary students.
“Funders need to open their dollars to intermediaries. We can help you go directly to an organization, or have a reach into the system of sport development. We can help you reach scale — reach hundreds of kids and those small BIPOC organizations at scale. And we will do the communications,” said Simril.
PEF put this intermediary role into action by partnering with Nike on a new initiative called ‘Made to Play’ in the Boyle Heights and Watts neighborhoods. The three-year, $1.3 million program aims to empower 13 community organizations to create equal access to play for Latina and Black girls.
“Nike asked to partner with us given our relationships on the ground and deep connections to this community – so we helped curate programs because of the trust we have here," said Simril. “Now we’re doing a second term with those organizations and creating a toolkit that can inform everyone involved in this type of work.”
Quote: Matt Geschke
The power of “opportunity influencers”
Derek Steele is the Executive Director of the Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI), a nonprofit that “exists to improve the overall health, education and wellbeing of youth and community of color by empowering them to enact the change they want to see” through research, training and community mobilization, in LA County and beyond. He is also the chair of the Care First Community Investment Advisory Committee that PEF works closely with to unlock resources for the sports based youth development sector.
“Young people don’t have a choice what family or community they were born into. But everything that is in that built environment has everything to do with their life outcomes — their ability to be school-ready, to be housed, to get a job. The social-emotional aspect — the health dynamics, is a place built for walkability, is it built for play?” said Steele.
Like PEF, Steele’s organization is focused on disrupting the cycles of concentrated disadvantage by creating what he calls “intentional randomness.” He explained: “Everyone has something random that changed things for them — the random math teacher that saw something in them that no one else did; the mom that made sure they had to go to soccer practice that meant that they ended up going on a summer trip to Europe. It’s random to that person, but it's intentional for the person giving the care. It’s the intention of the heart. We create an atmosphere so those things can happen, like through our Scholars Program.”
“The problems in South LA are not the same in Lancaster County or Long Beach. You have to have place-based strategies that help to provide the opportunity for those communities to come together and ideate on what the future looks like. The tools might be the same but the solutions are different.”
Care First Community Investment
In 2020, LA County approved Measure J which dedicated at least ten percent of the County’s locally generated unrestricted funds to address racial injustice and over-incarceration of Black and Brown communities. The money is meant to fund community investments; every year, $100 million is distributed to community programs from a “care first” standpoint.
A ‘Care First Investment Advisory Committee’ was established to oversee equitable distribution of those resources — a body of 24 people from all walks of life, chaired by Derek Steele for the last two years.
“That looks like nearly 345 organizations getting funding to elevate the work that they’re doing,” said Steele. “Now they can scale the impact of care in our community.”
For Tranche 3 of the funding, PEF led a large-scale community-driven process to make the case for funding to play equity-driven organizations. “We ran a 6-8 month campaign with community-attended meetings throughout the county — every concept that was submitted was eligible. PEF put together a leading program and submitted a concept for sport play and movement as a prevention to the criminal justice system, and won those organizations $15 million dollars,” said Fernando Ramirez.
The concept submitted by PEF was a demonstration of how on-the-ground, place-based intermediaries can make a huge difference to communities, by embedding equity into the process of funding: “We deconstructed the application process — we helped them apply for the money, guided them on what words to use,” said PEF leader Renata Simril.
“Employment is a central tenet for us, but not just employment that takes advantage of the community to extract from it, as West Virginia has done in the past. It’s about bringing along the community in this reclamation process.”
In Los Angeles, systems change starts locally
Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States, and LA County comprises 88 cities. Divide that into the number of neighborhoods with different needs, and you have a very varied community to serve. Despite these complexities, one issue that the most under-resourced people share in LA County is the lack of parks and opportunities for sport and play; plus recess isn’t mandated in the vast majority of schools.
So, in a place with an unmatched number of professional sports teams — the Dodgers, the Angels, the Kings, the Clippers; the list goes on — a huge number of young people, from largely Latino and Black communities, are without access to sports and the benefits it brings: health, team building, coaching, purpose, achievement, new experiences, and (for parents) child care. This is proven to impact girls in the area the most: according to a study by the Women’s Sports Foundation, young women have the highest dropout rate from sports, as many families can’t afford to send multiple children to programs and often rely on young women to act as essential caregiving support.
In response to this issue, the LA84 Foundation, formed in the wake of the 1984 Olympics in LA, created the Play Equity Fund (PEF) to “level the playing field” for access to sports, and establish the only nonprofit focused solely on “play equity” as a social justice issue. The team running the fund is unique in their approach: funding community, grassroots organizations that many philanthropies would not usually take a chance on. “We act as a convener and capacity builder, sharing research, convening, helping close gaps for grassroots organizations, and using our network insights and reach to change policies and systems,” says Play Equity Fund President, Renata Simril.
“The work we do for systems change — that’s not going to happen with one investment in one year. Come to us and put money in for five years and we’ll track the impact. If you want to have long-term impact and lift up BIPOC organizations, look at these changemaker intermediaries.”
Put grassroots first
PEF has helped drive key data to prove the impact of physical activity on mental wellness and the ability for communities to thrive. “We did a three-year longitudinal study that shows how sports participation encourages kids to stay in school longer, and also accelerates their English language skills when they engage in sports. But the data also showed that the gap had grown wider for most low-income kids’ ability to access sports,” said Simril. To reach the most kids, PEF has focused on supporting after-school programs that work with some of the six million kids in the California public school system.
PEF started with a coalition of grantees across Southern CA — listening and learning about what they needed to survive and flourish. “It was clear what was needed was capacity building to graduate from being small mom-and-pop organizations to stronger nonprofits,” said Simril.
Youth ‘N Motion in Leimert Park, CA is a great example of this nurturing approach. Through martial arts, the nonprofit was originally helping 25 young Black men who came from low-income neighborhoods and were at risk of becoming part of the youth incarceration system. “Our first grant to them was around $5,000,” said Simril. “Most funders won’t make grants that small to organizations of their size. We wanted to take a risk on this underdog. Eight years later, Youth ‘N Motion just received a $150k grant from a larger philanthropy, helping them expand to archery, and dance; and they serve hundreds of kids.”
Simril explains their flexibility in building capacity. “We bring the infrastructure they need to raise awareness but don’t know how to speak to the press, surface expert trends on mental wellness — whatever they need, we offer, to help them build capacity to serve more kids.”
Fernando Ramirez, Chief Policy and Public Affairs Officer at LA84 Foundation/Play Equity Fund explained the unique mindset: “I see it as ‘we work for these organizations.’ In each of those categories we have added resources or supported policy changes that unlock resources, space, and coaches.”
Invest in trusted relationships
Renata Simril is a vocal advocate for larger or corporate philanthropies to trust intermediaries like PEF to help them work effectively deep within neighborhoods because those intermediaries can help bridge the gap between decision-makers and community voices. PEF now has reach into 50 organizations in Southern California — what they call their “Voices of Play Equity” — allowing funders to leverage their dollars to go deep in specific neighborhoods and impact hundreds or thousands of lives. Plus, those funds not only go directly to local programs; they also contribute to accelerating the community pressure that PEF harnesses to help inform local and state policy in favor of the communities they serve. For example, they recently worked to create the King County Play Equity Coalition which helped pass a recess bill in Seattle, and did the same in California, guaranteeing recess for elementary students.
“Funders need to open their dollars to intermediaries. We can help you go directly to an organization, or have a reach into the system of sport development. We can help you reach scale — reach hundreds of kids and those small BIPOC organizations at scale. And we will do the communications,” said Simril.
PEF put this intermediary role into action by partnering with Nike on a new initiative called ‘Made to Play’ in the Boyle Heights and Watts neighborhoods. The three-year, $1.3 million program aims to empower 13 community organizations to create equal access to play for Latina and Black girls.
“Nike asked to partner with us given our relationships on the ground and deep connections to this community – so we helped curate programs because of the trust we have here," said Simril. “Now we’re doing a second term with those organizations and creating a toolkit that can inform everyone involved in this type of work.”
“Win, lose, try again”
Lindsay "Abdul Latif" Ferguson grew up in South Central LA. “Being a low-income area, there were gangs and things like that [while I was living and playing in the area]. When I first started martial arts it was basically to be able to defend myself,” he says. The more he practiced, the better he got, and he quickly became a national champion, traveling to Thailand to represent the U.S. “And this year I’m being inducted into the Hall of Fame!”
In 2005, Ferguson started a small nonprofit — Youth ‘N Motion Academy— to offer martial arts as an after-school program in his neighborhood; a chance to give back to the community and pass on the knowledge and value that he gained from his experience.
Ferguson is grateful to LA84/PEF for their unique role in supporting his organization in the early days. “They have been a huge benefit to us — Youth ‘N Motion Academy received its first grant from them. Their approach is very down to earth, very clear. With most nonprofit grants, you don’t get to meet the funder. With Renata and team, it's more hands-on, you can actually talk to them and resolve issues and go from there.”
Today, Ferguson is the Founder, President, and CEO of a growing organization that serves the Leimert Park area with karate and archery. “It’s majority African American, low-income kids. The biggest deterrent is kids don’t have access to sports and play, the ability to pay tuition, or to get to the classes. So we get funding to help pay for the kids’ tuition, tournament support, and equipment.”
Why does he do it? “The value is in their confidence level, their self-esteem, the overall fact of being able to compete, know what it is to win, lose, try again.”
“This approach allows us to deepen and sustain our impact in increasing access to sport, especially for girls. Through a place-based strategy led by the Play Equity Fund, we have unlocked the learnings to fuel a positive sport experience for girls that will lead to higher rates of participation and increased retention.”
The power of “opportunity influencers”
Derek Steele is the Executive Director of the Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI), a nonprofit that “exists to improve the overall health, education and wellbeing of youth and community of color by empowering them to enact the change they want to see” through research, training and community mobilization, in LA County and beyond. He is also the chair of the Care First Community Investment Advisory Committee that PEF works closely with to unlock resources for the sports based youth development sector.
“Young people don’t have a choice what family or community they were born into. But everything that is in that built environment has everything to do with their life outcomes — their ability to be school-ready, to be housed, to get a job. The social-emotional aspect — the health dynamics, is a place built for walkability, is it built for play?” said Steele.
Like PEF, Steele’s organization is focused on disrupting the cycles of concentrated disadvantage by creating what he calls “intentional randomness.” He explained: “Everyone has something random that changed things for them — the random math teacher that saw something in them that no one else did; the mom that made sure they had to go to soccer practice that meant that they ended up going on a summer trip to Europe. It’s random to that person, but it's intentional for the person giving the care. It’s the intention of the heart. We create an atmosphere so those things can happen, like through our Scholars Program.”
“The problems in South LA are not the same in Lancaster County or Long Beach. You have to have place-based strategies that help to provide the opportunity for those communities to come together and ideate on what the future looks like. The tools might be the same but the solutions are different.”
Care First Community Investment
In 2020, LA County approved Measure J which dedicated at least ten percent of the County’s locally generated unrestricted funds to address racial injustice and over-incarceration of Black and Brown communities. The money is meant to fund community investments; every year, $100 million is distributed to community programs from a “care first” standpoint.
A ‘Care First Investment Advisory Committee’ was established to oversee equitable distribution of those resources — a body of 24 people from all walks of life, chaired by Derek Steele for the last two years.
“That looks like nearly 345 organizations getting funding to elevate the work that they’re doing,” said Steele. “Now they can scale the impact of care in our community.”
For Tranche 3 of the funding, PEF led a large-scale community-driven process to make the case for funding to play equity-driven organizations. “We ran a 6-8 month campaign with community-attended meetings throughout the county — every concept that was submitted was eligible. PEF put together a leading program and submitted a concept for sport play and movement as a prevention to the criminal justice system, and won those organizations $15 million dollars,” said Fernando Ramirez.
The concept submitted by PEF was a demonstration of how on-the-ground, place-based intermediaries can make a huge difference to communities, by embedding equity into the process of funding: “We deconstructed the application process — we helped them apply for the money, guided them on what words to use,” said PEF leader Renata Simril.
In Los Angeles, systems change starts locally
Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States, and LA County comprises 88 cities. Divide that into the number of neighborhoods with different needs, and you have a very varied community to serve. Despite these complexities, one issue that the most under-resourced people share in LA County is the lack of parks and opportunities for sport and play; plus recess isn’t mandated in the vast majority of schools.
So, in a place with an unmatched number of professional sports teams — the Dodgers, the Angels, the Kings, the Clippers; the list goes on — a huge number of young people, from largely Latino and Black communities, are without access to sports and the benefits it brings: health, team building, coaching, purpose, achievement, new experiences, and (for parents) child care. This is proven to impact girls in the area the most: according to a study by the Women’s Sports Foundation, young women have the highest dropout rate from sports, as many families can’t afford to send multiple children to programs and often rely on young women to act as essential caregiving support.
In response to this issue, the LA84 Foundation, formed in the wake of the 1984 Olympics in LA, created the Play Equity Fund (PEF) to “level the playing field” for access to sports, and establish the only nonprofit focused solely on “play equity” as a social justice issue. The team running the fund is unique in their approach: funding community, grassroots organizations that many philanthropies would not usually take a chance on. “We act as a convener and capacity builder, sharing research, convening, helping close gaps for grassroots organizations, and using our network insights and reach to change policies and systems,” says Play Equity Fund President, Renata Simril.
“The work we do for systems change — that’s not going to happen with one investment in one year. Come to us and put money in for five years and we’ll track the impact. If you want to have long-term impact and lift up BIPOC organizations, look at these changemaker intermediaries.”
Put grassroots first
PEF has helped drive key data to prove the impact of physical activity on mental wellness and the ability for communities to thrive. “We did a three-year longitudinal study that shows how sports participation encourages kids to stay in school longer, and also accelerates their English language skills when they engage in sports. But the data also showed that the gap had grown wider for most low-income kids’ ability to access sports,” said Simril. To reach the most kids, PEF has focused on supporting after-school programs that work with some of the six million kids in the California public school system.
PEF started with a coalition of grantees across Southern CA — listening and learning about what they needed to survive and flourish. “It was clear what was needed was capacity building to graduate from being small mom-and-pop organizations to stronger nonprofits,” said Simril.
Youth ‘N Motion in Leimert Park, CA is a great example of this nurturing approach. Through martial arts, the nonprofit was originally helping 25 young Black men who came from low-income neighborhoods and were at risk of becoming part of the youth incarceration system. “Our first grant to them was around $5,000,” said Simril. “Most funders won’t make grants that small to organizations of their size. We wanted to take a risk on this underdog. Eight years later, Youth ‘N Motion just received a $150k grant from a larger philanthropy, helping them expand to archery, and dance; and they serve hundreds of kids.”
Simril explains their flexibility in building capacity. “We bring the infrastructure they need to raise awareness but don’t know how to speak to the press, surface expert trends on mental wellness — whatever they need, we offer, to help them build capacity to serve more kids.”
Fernando Ramirez, Chief Policy and Public Affairs Officer at LA84 Foundation/Play Equity Fund explained the unique mindset: “I see it as ‘we work for these organizations.’ In each of those categories we have added resources or supported policy changes that unlock resources, space, and coaches.”
Invest in trusted relationships
Renata Simril is a vocal advocate for larger or corporate philanthropies to trust intermediaries like PEF to help them work effectively deep within neighborhoods because those intermediaries can help bridge the gap between decision-makers and community voices. PEF now has reach into 50 organizations in Southern California — what they call their “Voices of Play Equity” — allowing funders to leverage their dollars to go deep in specific neighborhoods and impact hundreds or thousands of lives. Plus, those funds not only go directly to local programs; they also contribute to accelerating the community pressure that PEF harnesses to help inform local and state policy in favor of the communities they serve. For example, they recently worked to create the King County Play Equity Coalition which helped pass a recess bill in Seattle, and did the same in California, guaranteeing recess for elementary students.
“Funders need to open their dollars to intermediaries. We can help you go directly to an organization, or have a reach into the system of sport development. We can help you reach scale — reach hundreds of kids and those small BIPOC organizations at scale. And we will do the communications,” said Simril.
PEF put this intermediary role into action by partnering with Nike on a new initiative called ‘Made to Play’ in the Boyle Heights and Watts neighborhoods. The three-year, $1.3 million program aims to empower 13 community organizations to create equal access to play for Latina and Black girls.
“Nike asked to partner with us given our relationships on the ground and deep connections to this community – so we helped curate programs because of the trust we have here," said Simril. “Now we’re doing a second term with those organizations and creating a toolkit that can inform everyone involved in this type of work.”
“This approach allows us to deepen and sustain our impact in increasing access to sport, especially for girls. Through a place-based strategy led by the Play Equity Fund, we have unlocked the learnings to fuel a positive sport experience for girls that will lead to higher rates of participation and increased retention.”
The power of “opportunity influencers”
Derek Steele is the Executive Director of the Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI), a nonprofit that “exists to improve the overall health, education and wellbeing of youth and community of color by empowering them to enact the change they want to see” through research, training and community mobilization, in LA County and beyond. He is also the chair of the Care First Community Investment Advisory Committee that PEF works closely with to unlock resources for the sports based youth development sector.
“Young people don’t have a choice what family or community they were born into. But everything that is in that built environment has everything to do with their life outcomes — their ability to be school-ready, to be housed, to get a job. The social-emotional aspect — the health dynamics, is a place built for walkability, is it built for play?” said Steele.
Like PEF, Steele’s organization is focused on disrupting the cycles of concentrated disadvantage by creating what he calls “intentional randomness.” He explained: “Everyone has something random that changed things for them — the random math teacher that saw something in them that no one else did; the mom that made sure they had to go to soccer practice that meant that they ended up going on a summer trip to Europe. It’s random to that person, but it's intentional for the person giving the care. It’s the intention of the heart. We create an atmosphere so those things can happen, like through our Scholars Program.”
Quote: Derek Steele
