Our Mission Statement: 

The relief, assistance and empowerment of peoples in need, in less developed areas of the world through sport & vocational training.

We have been appointed GAA Charity of the Year for 2011 which is an honour and a privilege.  We would like to thank Christy Cooney and all our volunteers for making this possible. Your help will go such a long way enabling us to continue building brighter futures for poverty stricken communities in Africa.

 Volunteering for Playing for Life

This year we are recruiting volunteers for a ten day stay in Malawi in late August, Kenya in early December and Ethiopia in early January 2012. We need all sorts of people who are willing to fundraise for us and for Malawi, we will need Medical professionals and builders, carpenters, welders, I.T. teachers, music & drama enthusiasts, home economic teachers, sports people and anyone willing to roll up their sleeves and help.   Our volunteers are asked to raise a sponsorship total of €4500 from which all travel and accommodation costs are paid and the balance goes to support Playing for Life projects. For more information see our projects section.

 A note from Tracy,

 Playing For Life has worked closely with communities in Tanzania, Kenya and Malawi since 2005 and we focus on the teaching and training of skills and trades, mainly in rural areas where many young people do not get the opportunities to complete a full education.

Once the community is able to access food and rise above the poverty line, the next step on the road to self sustainability is education, whether vocational or academic. In many cases, the school system is not an option for many young people and unless they excel to the point where they are likely to qualify as doctors, lawyers or teachers, there is little for them to do in terms of generating income into adulthood. This will often lead to the boy or girl having to leave their family, friends and community to find work in the bigger towns and cities where they usually find themselves in much worse conditions, in a slum environment and many do not survive.

So imagine the opportunity to gain a skill, to get a government approved certificate that allows that person to be able to set up a small enterprise, be it making beds, coffins and cupboards from a road side stall, selling clothes that they have made themselves, or blocklaying and building in their village.  This can generate enough income for them to support themselves and loved ones; we have seen the evidence time and again since we began.

We send students to skills training college in order to be able to get these qualifications and we supply them with the tools necessary to get started e.g. a sewing machine, woodwork or building tools or a computer.

We ask volunteers who partake in our projects in Africa over a 10 to 12 day period and to roll out introductory workshops in the various skills or trades that the community has asked us to provide, that they feel will assist them going forward. This gives both the visitors and the local people a unique and wonderful insight into something they would never have experienced before.

For the local communities they see that there are ways to improve their lives with shared knowledge and not just a hand out, but a hand up. For the volunteers it is an opportunity to give something back, to connect on a very special level with a totally new culture and to get a real sense of giving something of themselves, something incredibly valuable, worthwhile and life changing.

Through sport and play, Playing for Life also helps to educate youngsters about the dangers and social myths and taboos surrounding Hiv/AIDS. Using this physical tool as a medium to get messages across we have found that the children participate on a much more positive level and really 'take in', and open up about the issues that we address.

Thank you for taking the time to look at our website and read this page.

Tracy