Kick-Off: Uniting Communities with Soccer in Peru!

Dear friends,

In the past weeks, we visited Santa Rosa, in Cutervo, Cajamarca, in the northern Andes of Peru, to prepare for the next stage of Kick Off. The school remains fully engaged, and the students are waiting for the trainings to return. If everything goes as planned, the sessions will restart during the second half of the year.

Since 2019, Kick Off has brought weekly learning sessions to children and teenagers in rural Peru. Between the original pilot in Cuncani (Cusco) and the current phase in Santa Rosa (Cutervo), more than 100 sessions have taken place, including an additional 22 sessions completed last year in Cutervo. In the first years, the project also included Canadian university students who participated directly on the field, contributing to the implementation.

Kick Off has never been designed as an extracurricular activity. In contexts where formal education is often limited or highly structured, these sessions offer children a space to move, to pay attention, to interact, and to practice how to relate with others. What starts with a ball becomes a shared learning experience—one that allows children to grow together, not only as players but as learners.

Until now, the project has been fully sustained by student program fees (before the pandemic) and individual donations raised through GlobalGiving. Every dollar has gone directly to make the sessions possible: hiring trained coaches, providing equipment, and covering the logistics that allow the children to gather week after week.

Now, as we enter the next stage of Kick Off after the pandemic, we are ready to move forward. This year, thanks to your participation, we aim to take what happens on the field one step further. The new phase will introduce simple, age-appropriate practices that allow children to experience how learning happens not only through movement, but also through how they pay attention, how they relate to each other, and how they perceive the situations around them. These sessions will integrate basic Warm Data-inspired conversations and activities where children learn to observe small shifts: who joins a game, who steps aside, how decisions emerge in a group. Bit by bit, these experiences help them build relational awareness — the ability to read context, to hold uncertainty, and to develop the kind of practical understanding that stays with them beyond school, sports or formal lessons.

This work remains possible thanks to the people who continue to hold it. Omar, who has coordinated the project in Santa Rosa since the beginning, leads the local efforts. Griffin, who supported last year’s activities on-site and led the fundraising campaign from Canada, is once again actively involved. And this year, Ashley, one additional volunteer from Canada, will join the team on the ground.

The field will soon open again. What begins with a game becomes, every time, a space where learning grows from practice, presence, and shared time.

Thank you for staying with us—and stay tuned for what is coming.

With gratitude,

María del Carmen