Project Play develops, applies and shares knowledge that helps build healthy communities through sports

About Project Play
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Leaders from across sectors believe in the power of sport to build healthy communities where young people from diverse backgrounds can play together, a foundation for social trust. Parents are concerned their child will get left out, pushed out or burned out by a sport model that has gotten expensive and exclusionary, with rising injury rates and less free play. Everyone recognizes that no one group can address these challenges alone.

Project Play connects the silos across the disjointed landscape of youth and school sports and develops systems-level solutions. Launched in 2013 by the Sports & Society Program of the Aspen Institute, the award-winning initiative convenes leaders, identifies gaps in access to quality sport activity, and mobilizes organizations for action. We drive progress through:

Research: We produce exclusive reports that take measure of the state of play from the national to community levels and provide the evidence base to design policies and unlock new investments. We survey youth in schools to understand their perspectives, and commission studies on specific topics (e.g. youth coaching).
Dialogue: We host the nation’s premier annual gathering of leaders building healthy children through sports, the Project Play Summit. We help convene task forces of local leaders to share knowledge and develop partnerships. We create forums for organizations within specific sectors to share knowledge and identify best practices.
Resources: All of our work is guided by three frameworks, for youth sports, school sports, and the Children’s Bill of Rights in Sports. We focus changemakers on these strategies and principles. We also share free resources such as our Parent Checklists and Teamwork Toolkit.
Thought leadership: We pump big ideas into the bloodstream that leaders can rally around, through solutions-focused journalism, op-eds, blogs, social media, our newsletter, media interviews, and storytelling on innovative programs addressing gaps and challenges.
Network-building: Today, Project Play is a community of more than 20,000 leaders that we communicate with on a monthly basis, digitally and through meetings. Among them: the 23 members of the Project Play 2024 roundtable of leading industry, government and philanthropic entities, and the 120 Project Play Champions organizations that have taken specific, aligned actions with our strategies.

Our work has focused on the base of our sport system because of the myriad lifetime benefits that flow to active youth. In 2015, Project Play released its first framework, Sport for All, Play for Life: A Playbook to Get Every Kid in the Game, aggregating the most promising opportunities to emerge from two years of roundtables with 250+ experts. It highlighted eight strategies, or Plays, for the eight sectors that touch the lives of youth.

THE 8 PLAYS FOR YOUTH SPORTS

PLAY 1: Ask Kids What They Want
PLAY 2: Reintroduce Free Play
PLAY 3: Encourage Sport Sampling
PLAY 4: Revitalize In-Town Leagues
PLAY 5: Think Small
PLAY 6: Design for Development
PLAY 7: Train All Coaches
PLAY 8: Emphasize Prevention

The Playbook soon became one of the most-read reports in the history of the Aspen Institute. In his keynote at the inaugural Project Play Summit in 2015, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said, “You have built a very powerful roadmap“ for innovation and cross-sector collaboration, and encouraged groups to develop actions aligned with report.

That, indeed, is what has happened.

PROJECT PLAY’S IMPACT

Hundreds of organizations have used our work to shape their youth strategies or introduce aligned programs. Among them: professional leagues, media companies, national sport governing bodies, parks and recreation departments, foundations, and community sport providers.
The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, a founding Project Play 2024 member, implemented the American Development Model, a resource designed to help anchor our disjointed sport system in the principles of developmentally appropriate play. By 2020, more than 20 National Governing Bodies had developed ADM plans.
The first-ever recommendations for the sport sector were created for the National Physical Activity Plan. Project Play staff helped craft the recommendations in 2016 as members of the advisory group.
The first-ever National Youth Sports Strategy was introduced in 2019 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, with recognition of the Sport for All, Play for Life report as a key resource for increasing youth sports participation. The federal government began to collect annual data on organized youth sport participation, and set a goal of 63.3% of students participating on a sports team by 2030.
Citing our research, news media outlets have helped create a national conversation about access to and the challenges of youth sports. Among them: The New York Times, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, ESPN, SportsBusiness Journal, The Atlantic, USA Today, and the BBC.
Data-driven insights on how well youth are being served through sports have been developed across the country. Local State of Play reports have been produced for Baltimore, Harlem, Southeast Michigan, Western New York, the Greater Rochester area, Mobile County, Alabama, Seattle and King County, Wash., Hawai’i, Central Ohio and Camden, N.J. The reports have helped stakeholders address community gaps.
Foundation and government resources have been unlocked and shaped by our work. In Michigan and New York, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation has distributed more than $85 million in grants to youth programs and invested another $200 million in skateparks, greenways, bike paths and other recreation infrastructure. The foundation’s innovative grantmaking strategies are driven by its regional State of Play reports with Project Play. One of the foundation’s initiatives, Built to Play, has invested more than $16 million to support the creation of more than 20 skateparks and 70 unique play spaces and playgrounds. In the Seattle region, King County’s $110 million in new grant funding for urban parks and open space, targeted equity, and aquatics asks that grantees implement recommendations from our State of Play Seattle–King County report. In 2021, New York became the first state to use legalized sports betting to fund youth sports — an idea developed in 2018 by the Aspen Institute. Ohio was the next state to follow, allocating an estimated $12 million a year to school-based and afterschool programs.
Major industry groups and nonprofits came together for the first time to pursue shared goals in growing sport participation and related metrics among youth. The Project Play 2020 roundtable was created in 2017, comprised of 20 organizations committing to develop mutually reinforcing actions over the next three years. The effort was renewed and renamed Project Play 2024 in recognition of a new, four-year commitment. Shared actions include Don’t Retire Kid, the most critically acclaimed public awareness campaign on youth sports. Launched on ESPN with Kobe Bryant in 2019, the campaign won 37 international awards and generated 4.8 billion media impressions. Other activations include the creation of How to Coach Kids, a free coaching course; Teamwork Toolkit, a tool to help local leaders assess their state of play at the hyper-local level; the Healthy Sport Index, a tool to help families evaluate sport options; and Parent Checklists to help keep kids active through sports.
The Project Play Summit has established itself the nation’s premier gathering of leaders building healthy communities through sports. The Summit sells out each year when held in person and #ProjectPlay has trended nationally on Twitter during the event. Speakers have included Michelle Obama, Kobe Bryant, Billie Jean King, Rob Manfred, Allyson Felix, Tony Hawk, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, David Brooks, Adam Silver, Jimmy Pitaro, Sarah Hirshland, Michael Lewis, Jeremy Lin, Cindy Cone, Gregg Berhalter, Greg Olsen and Alex Morgan.
40+ influential sport bodies endorsed multisport play in response to the trend toward early sport specialization. NCAA leaders wrote a column for the Aspen Institute encouraging multisport play and calling on college sport leaders to reexamine early recruitment rules.
The concept of “physical literacy” has been defined and elevated across sectors. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a working group of experts from education, academia and sport, the Aspen Institute produced the report Physical Literacy in the United States: A Model, Strategic Plan, and Call to Action.
Collective progress was made in reducing the percentage of youth who have no exposure to sport activity. In 2014, 19.7% of youth ages 6 to 12 did not play a sport in any form even one day during the year, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. By 2018, that figure had fallen to 17.1%. Then COVID-19 hit, shutting down sports, exacting a devastating toll on youth, including physical activity rates.
Essential insights on the impact of COVID-19 on youth were produced to help leaders navigate the pandemic. Within weeks of the shutdown, Project Play commissioned surveys with Utah State University that became the population-level data that news media and stakeholders used to understand the challenges and opportunities facing youth in sports. These insights have appeared in a series of reports, including our annual national State of Play report.
Strategies have been identified to build a 21st century model for school sports. Starting in 2020, reports were published on the most innovative school programs, starting with middle schools. A national search for exemplary high schools then was launched through our Reimagining School Sports project, with $160,000 in awards provided by partners (Adidas/BOKs, DICK’S Sporting Goods Foundation, and Hospital for Special Surgery). The project included a survey of more than 6,000 students on their sport interests and habits. In March 2022, a final report was published with systems-level recommendations on how schools can develop the widest swath of the student population through sports. Next step: Working with the National Federation of State High School Associations and other partners to implement the strategies.
Other countries began using Project Play to reimagine their sport delivery systems. In 2017, the Aspen Institute in Romania partnered with its Olympic committee to develop release a national plan at the Joacă pentru Viaţă Summit. In 2020, Aspen Institute Romania signed a protocol with the country’s ministries of education and youth and sport to declare physical literacy a national priority. In 2018, the Aspen Institute’s affiliate in Mexico launched a nationwide project leading to a capstone report. In 2022, youth surveys were launched in Canada and Project Play represented the United States at the World Congress of TAFISA, the international sport-for-all organization.
A framework was for children’s rights in sports. Drafted with the help of human rights and sports policy experts, Children’s Bill of Rights in Sports identifies the minimum conditions under which programs should serve youth through sports. Endorsed by more than 130 organizations and 300+ athletes including NBA MVP Stephen Curry, the bill of rights aligns with principles expressed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is designed to forge a shared cultural understanding that all youth should have the opportunity to develop as people through sport.

In sum, Project Play has become the venue and engine to reimagine youth and school sports – in their best form.

“Project Play is a true catalyst for change, bringing the entire youth sports industry together for the benefit of youth.”

Kevin Martinez, VP, Corporate Citizenship, ESPN

OUR MISSION

An initiative of the Sports & Society Program of the Aspen Institute, Project Play develops, applies and shares knowledge that helps stakeholders build healthy communities through sports.

The mission of the Sports & Society Program is to convene leaders, facilitate dialogue, and inspire solutions that help sports serve the public interest. The program provides a venue for thought leadership where knowledge can be deepened and breakthrough strategies explored on a range of issues. More: sportsandsociety.org.

The Aspen Institute is a global nonprofit organization committed to realizing a free, just, and equitable society. Since its founding in 1949, the Institute has been driving change through dialogue, leadership, and action to help solve the most critical challenges facing communities in the United States and around the world. More: www.aspeninstitute.org.