Community Sports Program (CSP) 2025-26

Appeal for funding!

With our current cohort of the Community Sports Program (CSP) ending in May 2025, Pro Sport Development (PSD) aims to sustain the program by engaging 150 young people aged 10-16 years from marginalized slum communities in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, through the CSP for the academic year 2025-26, and we need your help!

The CSP will empower these young people as confident, competent and gender-sensitive leaders and agents of change within their communities through participation in a purposefully designed sport-based program delivered by trained facilitators, along with provision for personal sports kits and access to multi-sports equipment and sports competitions.

We aim to raise ₹ 5 lakhs to continue our programming with these 150 participating young people for one year in Bhubaneswar to enable them to benefit from its impact. 

This is how you can contribute to the program: 

Context  

Odisha is one of the poorest states in India, with 30% of its population multidimensionally poor. Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Odisha, has a population of 36% living in 436 slum pockets. Most of the slum dwellers in Bhubaneswar are low-skilled and/ or daily wage workers, earning an estimated monthly family income of ₹6,667.

Young people living in Bhubaneswar’s slums face inadequacies in their education. The community schools they attend lack the infrastructure, funding or expertise to deliver holistic educational services that provide experiential learning to build confidence and develop life skills. These deficiencies mean that young people possess limited confidence, capacities and resilience to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life, hence decreasing their chances of enrolling in higher education and gaining meaningful employment in the future.

Against this backdrop, girls and young women in Bhubaneswar’s slums face formidable obstacles due to prevalent gender-based discrimination and inequality, leading to their vulnerability to violence and exclusion, including at all levels of their education in Odisha, with a female dropout rate of 25.2% at the secondary school level. The prevalence of gender disparity in Bhubaneswar’s slums also manifests into public health and wellbeing concerns, negatively impacting girls and women, with research identifying one-fifth of girls as “developmentally vulnerable, having poor adaptive and cognitive functioning”.

About the Community Sports Program

Pro Sport Development (PSD) has been implementing its flagship Community Sports Program (CSP) in Bhubaneswar, Odisha in India since 2015. The CSP works with young people aged 5-16 years from marginalized slum communities across Bhubaneswar, Odisha, utilizing sport, physical activity and play as tools to empower them as confident, competent and gender-sensitive leaders and agents of change within their communities. 

The CSP was recognized by the International Olympic Committee’s Sport and Active Society Commission in 2018 for its promotion of sport for all.

Impact

Stories of change

Click on the following links to read more:

Sailekha Behra - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q66iR4kTpLRiwkS8fExxaTFL3pYPoifH/view

Ankit Basantara - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ueU_E0X2tPMkgNgJpcC4GcBHouT5gdVP/view