In 2017, Econsult Solutions, Inc. (ESI) was hired by the Philadelphia Youth Sports Collaborative (PYSC) to support the Philadelphia Task Force on Sports Based Youth Development (SBYD). The Task Force was created to spearhead the Game On Philly! initiative, a five-year campaign with the goal of providing every child in Philadelphia with an opportunity to participate in a SBYD program.
The Task Force found that a focus on sports-based youth development can make a profound difference in the lives of young people in Philadelphia, where one in five children gets the recommended 60 minutes a day of physical activity and one in five gets no physical activity at all.
Traditional youth sports programs are often too expensive, have limited access to facilities and fields, and do not have adequate resources to grow to scale. PYSC and the Task Force have identified three key areas of SBYD programs that need improvement and ways to address them:
- Increase access and affordability for the Place where SBYD programs operate;
- Increase the reach, scale and quality of SBYD Programs across all neighborhoods;
- Increase the capacity and training of the People – professionals and volunteers – who operate and deliver SBYD programming to children.
ESI planned and staffed the task force, and also conducted extensive research, surveying 30 organizations in the City of Philadelphia to obtain more detailed and accurate data. Participants included both local organizations operating exclusively in Philadelphia and national organizations. The analysis of survey responses, along with ESI’s collection of publicly available IRS Form 990 information, yielded the results included in this report.
As a final step, the Philadelphia Task Force on Sports Based Youth Development has established eight recommended strategies to build and support the SBYD system, as well as key measures of success that will hopefully be achieved by the end of the campaign in 2023.
