It's every child's Right to Play, isn't it?
Published: Friday, September 28, 2007
Right to Play is an Olympics sports-founded charitable organization with a remarkable renewable resource making the rounds out there in some company office or another.
A Canadian Olympic team jacket from the Winter Games in Turin, Italy, with every Canadian athlete’s signature — conscripted by indefatigable speed skater Clara Hughes and her physiotherapist — has been rented out in three-month increments for $50,000.
“We’d take more,” grinned Johann Olav Koss, himself a four-time speed-skating gold medalist, three of them in his Norwegian homeland, the Lillehammer Games in 1994.
The rental agreement comes with a motivational speech from our Clara. It might be remembered the two-sport star — two bronze medals in cycling in Atlanta Summer Games and Winter (four speed-skating medals including a gold in the 5,000 at Turin ) — trumped everything she accomplished on the ice or her bike by donating $10,000 of her own savings to Right to Play after her gold-medal victory in Italy.
The original idea was to get all the Canadian athletes to sign the jacket and then sell it on eBay until the light went on in someone’s head that a better idea would be to rent it. So companies who want to have their employees inspired can have it hang in their office for three months following a motivational speech from Hughes.
Koss, who moved to Toronto in the fall of 2000, founded Right to Play after being an ambassador for Olympic Aid which was born out of the Lillehammer organizing committee’s desire to recognize war-torn Sarajevo and help children who had been affected by the conflict there.
Right before his ’94 speed-skating performance, Koss visited Eritrea, which had been in a 30-year war with Ethiopia where he met some kids. One of them had a long-sleeved shirt on.
“He told me he had to be there because his shirt was the ball they used in their pickup soccer game. He showed me how he rolled it up and made it into the ball.”
Two months after the Lillehammer Games, Koss challenged the Norwegian children to donate extra sports equipment and he took 13 tons of balls and shoes and equipment back to Eritrea.
The organization is still closely aligned with the IOC and the Olympic movement. Beckie Scott, Silken Laumann, Hughes, Wayne Gretzky, Alexander Ovechkin, Lance Armstrong and Zinedine Zidane — are all athlete ambassadors.
Scott, in fact, will be moving to Vancouver and will begin working part time for Right to Play.
In case you didn’t know, Right To Play is an athlete-driven international humanitarian organization that uses specially-designed sport and play programs to improve health, build life skills, and foster peace for children and communities affected by war, poverty and disease.
Working in both the humanitarian and development contexts, Right To Play has 53 projects in more than 20 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, simply because that’s where the conflicts are.
They are working directly with those in need and partnering directly with leading aid agencies, such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNICEF, CARE, and the Red Cross. They have 11,000 coaches working with the kids.
Right to Play just opened an office in Vancouver where Scott will work with former national team swimmer Ryan Laurin thanks to the philanthropic nature of a couple of influential, heavy-hitting CEOs — community leader Peter Dhillon of Richberry Group of Companies and VANOC’s John Furlong, who is providing the office space.
Since spring, I’ve written about Steve Nash’s support of the Gula Walk, Rick Gill’s Hoops 4 Hope, the Lewis Chitengwa Foundation and about the Zambia Under-20 soccer team where several players had only one or no parents because of AIDS. Is there a chance potential supporters will be turned off?
“It can’t be done too much,” Koss says passionately. “We estimate there are 700 million children who have no access to play. It might be more.”
When children play, the world wins, is their slogan. And who can argue?
