Twickenham based social enterprise Harper Performance needs your help raising £30,000 to support aspirational athletes in deprived communities across the world
Twickenham-based SEUK certified social enterprise Harper Performance has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise at least £30k in just 30 days to enable its team of experts to continue their work supporting aspirational athletes in disadvantaged, deprived and marginalised communities across the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2018 a team of expert practitioners – from sports scientists to physiotherapists and sports nutritionists – drawn from elite sports teams all over the world will head to Liberia, Uganda and Kenya to support sports academies in some of the most deprived communities in the world.
In Liberia and Uganda, the non-profit will be working with two of the fastest growing football academies in Africa: the Monrovia Football Academy and the Football For Good Academy, where elite football development is coupled with world-class academic teaching. In Kenya, the team will be working to support aspirational long distance runners from rural areas with Project Africa Athletics.
The expert team boasts over 150 years of combined experience in elite sport and will help to build the capacity of these sports organisations to best support their most talented athletes from a sports science, sports medicine, and nutrition perspective.
The mission at Harper Performance is not to transplant the high-performance sports systems of Western Europe, Australia or the USA to the organisations they work with in Liberia, Uganda or Kenya. Ownership of the performance-support systems of those they work with remain in the locality, with their team there to plug skills-gaps, provide expertise in the same way a consultancy would with a client back home and help facilitate the development of a sustainable ‘Monrovian/Kenyan/Ugandan’ solution to performance-support for elite athletes. Harper Performance aims to duild capacity, not reliance, to complement, not take over.
A successful crowdfunding campaign will ensure the social enterprise can continue to provide world-class support that is traditionally out of reach to some of the most promising athletes in the developing world pro-bono or for heavily subsidised fees.
“We believe that The KANJU Campaign is a fantastic opportunity for the UK community to get behind a really important international cause," says Tim Harper, Founding Director at Harper Performance. "Sport can be an unbelievable force for good – there are countless examples of how sport can be a more effective catalyst for social change than years of government policy, especially in the developing world.
"The athletes and organisations we work with herald from areas in the world where, for large swathes of the population, daily survival is the top priority, and in that sense, our work, and sport in general, may seem like a superficial event. But it is our belief, and the belief of those we work with on the ground, that sport serves as a marker of stability in an otherwise volatile and challenging existence.
"Sport allows these athletes and communities to forge an identity and draw international attention for reasons other than the conflict, poverty, famine and disease that disproportionately fill our airwaves on a daily basis – attracting business, investment and carving out genuine social change.”
The KANJU Campaign is offering a range of exciting rewards in return for pledges, including the naming rights to one of its 2018 projects, a VIP private dinner with its team of experts and limited edition clothing and accessories.
You can pledge your support via: crowdfunder.co.uk/the-kanju-campaign
You can also pledge your support by buying some of Top Herd's delicious organic snacks and quoting KANJU at checkout. The lovely Top Herd will donate a whopping 50% of your order to the campaign AND throw in a few extra bags for you.
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