Coaching Corps

For my practice experience I will be working with Coaching Corps, an organization that uses the power of sports and service to improve educational, health and social outcomes for underserved youth. They are partnered up with many organizations across the Bay Area, looking for assistant coaches to help run youth sports teams as well as serve as mentors for these kids. The partner organization Coaching Corps assigned me to was Berkeley Youth Alternatives, a non-profit, community-initiated organization located in Berkeley, CA, that provides a multitude of counseling resources and after school programs for troubled youth, including sports fitness. I am currently an assistant coach for a 5^th grade girls basketball team, where my responsibilities extend not only into the realm of basketball instruction and sports discipline, but also into the role of a mentor and guiding figure. 

One of the aspects of my organization I love the most is Coaching Corps strives to utilize their students volunteers beyond the couple weekly practices they attend and carry out larger events to directly address other areas of these children's lives like the importance of education. One of those events will be occurring this Sunday, April 13. Coaching Corps will be hosting Take Your Team to College Day. This event will bring the kids we serve to the Berkeley college campus and will give them an opportunity to explore the possibilities of higher education. At this year's event, we have kids coming from Bears Youth Basketball, Willard Middle School, and MLK Jr. Middle School. This is the agenda they provided us:

10:30AM-11:45AM Volunteers Meet Up & Introductions

Help with any set ups/preparations and receive a tour guide map with talking points to review; participate in an ice breaker and form a buddy system when the kids arrive; interact with the kids!

11:45AM-12:45PM Campus Tour

Give a tour of the UC Berkeley campus! You will not give a tour alone; you will work with a buddy of your choice as well as a student-athlete. All tour maps, stops, and talking points will be given to you so no prior knowledge is necessary at all.

12:45PM-1:15PM Scavenger Hunt

Help out with a Scavenger Hunt that includes Sather Gate, Campanile, and more! 

1:15PM-2:10PM College Student Panels

Be a part of a panel with student athletes and discuss college life, give advice and info about staying active. 

2:10PM-2:45PM Activity & Pick Up Game

Participate in a quick activity and a soccer pick up game with the kids!

2:45PM–3PM Closing

Closing remarks, hand out goodie bags, answer any questions, and take photos.

As you can see it's a packed schedule filled with many positive experiences and provide these children with opportunities to learn about higher education as well as do the things they love, like sports. Juxtaposing the two in an event like this is a great way of teaching these underserved children to associate the fun they have with sports with school.

The reason why I bring this up is not only because this event is quickly approaching, but because of our discussion of visual documentation both in class and discussion. Many of the photos on Coaching Corps's website display exactly these sort of events of youth empowerment and support. That is how they market their cause and receive funding. In our discussion when we were looking and analyzing each other's photos (from our respective organizations), we discussed what our organizations were trying to get across. It's nice to see those pictures come to life and witness what they were trying to get across first hand through this event.    

Big Data for Small Languages

In his Tedx Talk, Phillip Parker talks about what he believes to be technology’s latest revolutionary frontier: Big Data. One of the barriers to true education in developing countries that I hadn’t previously considered is that of language. We always talk about language barriers in the context of us not understanding the third world, but what if we flipped the tables and looked at things from their perspective? As difficult as it is for us to communicate with them in their language, it is arguably even harder for them to understand us in ours. Add to that, given the abundance of knowledge and data that we have in the English language, it’s important to consider the amount of information that is available but inaccessible to these underserved parts of the world.

In the words of Parker, this is the problem: “There’s a world of information out there… and maybe the person who can most benefit from this information is on the other side of the world. They don’t read academic journals, they don’t speak English, and they are in a world that has been undeserved because of their small languages.”

This couldn’t be truer! It is a market failure that the demand for this information from third world countries is unmet, simply because, economically, it is not a profitable venture for institutions with this information to translate academic journals, articles, etc. into these small languages for these small populations. These populations, therefore, are not supplied with the information that could be highly beneficial to them – be it simple things like weather forecast information that could help with agricultural endeavors, or school textbooks to educate and motivate current and potential students.

On our side of the world, we have the technology to make this information accessible to them, to translate these different texts into small languages. Parker talks about EVE—a collection of programs, which is an economically viable entity—which takes formulaic English and makes translations on autopilot. The keyword here is “economically viable”; our technology makes it affordable to really spread knowledge and data to largely rural non-English-speaking populations.

If this is one of the barriers to true and necessary information transfer, and taken more broadly, a barrier to equality and social justice, we need to start considering this language problem as one that we can solve, not by imposing our own English language on these small-language-speakers, but by directly providing information in their own small languages.