Tommy Clark (CEO and founder), Chris Barkley (Mental Health Advisor), and Charmaine Nyakonda (Mental Health Specialist) describe how Grassroot Soccer uses sports, play, and mentorship to promote adolescent health and behavior change. The organization began over two decades ago in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, applying social learning theory and the popularity of soccer to make health education engaging and memorable. Today, its programs focus on helping adolescents manage their thoughts and emotions, maintain healthy bodies, and build strong support networks.

At the heart of the model are near-peer coaches—young mentors from the same communities as participants—who create safe, stigma-free spaces for open conversations about mental health. “Young people are the experts of their own lives,” says Barkley, emphasizing the organization’s belief that youth perspectives must shape every stage of design and delivery. Programs are co-developed with adolescents, powered by play, and built on strengths rather than deficits.

Their work includes:

• Training non-specialist coaches to deliver mental health and life-skills sessions.
• Running a global Youth Advisory Committee, whose members co-design curricula and evaluate impact.
• Embedding meaningful engagement so youth ideas are not only heard, but implemented and funded.
• Supporting coaches’ own wellbeing through monthly debriefs, peer support groups, referral partnerships, and wellness activities tailored to local contexts.

Grassroot Soccer’s model has influenced policy and programming across Africa. In Kenya, the MindSKILLZ pilot showed how coaches could successfully engage adolescents living with disabilities, while in Zambia, youth coaches helped adapt the curriculum to make sessions “more fun” and more responsive to participants’ needs. In 2024, governments in Malawi, Zimbabwe, and South Africa began naming adolescents and youth in national mental health strategies and invited Grassroot Soccer to join technical working groups focused on adolescent wellbeing.

Mental health still receives only a small share of the national health budgets in the countries where the organization works, with most resources directed toward specialized care. Persistent social and economic pressures—poverty, violence, limited education, and few employment opportunities—continue to affect young people’s mental health. Grassroot Soccer addresses these realities by working alongside communities and adolescents to co-design programs that are practical, strengths-based, and rooted in play, connection, and youth leadership.

Kunda Mwitwa's journey with Grassroot Soccer began in primary school in Zambia, where she first heard about coaches using soccer games and soccer metaphors to teach adolescent health. At the time, she had wanted to play professional football, but only the boys in her school had a soccer team. She joined the SKILLZ program and found a safe space with near-peer mentors who understood the challenges she was going through. Years later, she became a coach herself, implementing programs in communities across Zambia. Today, she serves as partnerships program coordinator and chairs Grassroot Soccer's Youth Advisory Council — a body of 18 young people drawn from seven priority geographies who provide advisory and advocacy to shape the organization's strategy.

Grassroot Soccer's model is built on what Mwitwa describes as the 3 Cs: coaches, curriculum, and culture. Coaches are near-peer mentors drawn directly from the communities where programs are implemented. The curriculum is research-based and tailored by age and gender — with separate programs for younger adolescents, older girls, older boys, and specific curricula focused on mental health and HIV. The culture includes KILOs (creative forms of praise and clapping) and energizers (fun songs and dances) designed to create a welcoming, safe learning environment. Mwitwa's work includes:

• Chairing the Youth Advisory Council, which advises on organizational strategy and ensures the organization responds to the needs of the adolescents it serves.
• Representing Grassroot Soccer on the WHO Youth Council, a 25-member body that advises the director-general of the World Health Organization.
• Co-developing a Youth Declaration on Health Societies through the WHO Youth Council, gathering feedback from Grassroot Soccer's Youth Advisory Council members who are also the implementers of programs in their communities.
• Speaking at the UN ECOSOC Youth Forum in New York, presenting findings on mental health work to an international audience.
• Advocating for youth engagement across platforms, including social media, learning webinars, and institutional meetings.

From her time as a coach, Mwitwa learned that the most effective way to engage young people is meeting them where they are — not just physically, but by understanding the challenges they face. Home visits allowed her to see the environments participants returned to after sessions. Community dialogue meetings brought together participants, parents, and healthcare providers to address barriers like judgmental attitudes at health facilities. Training as a community-based distributor enabled her to offer contraceptives and HIV testing directly, so young people wouldn't have to travel long distances or face stigma at clinics.

Mwitwa is direct about what she sees as barriers to meaningful youth engagement. Organizations often don't take young people seriously, she notes, making assumptions based on age rather than capability. Young people are frequently used as statistics or consulted only at the beginning of projects, then left out of implementation and evaluation. Her recommendations center on simplifying processes, reducing bureaucracy, and investing in young people's capacity building and networks — not just finances. The most urgent concerns she hears in advocacy spaces are around financing for youth mental health and the uncertainty created by aid cuts, particularly for adolescents living with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa who rely on external funding for treatment and support programs.

At Grassroot Soccer, Chris Barkley serves on the research and development team, where his work focuses on understanding the organization's impact from the perspectives of coaches, parents, teachers, and young people themselves. His vantage point sits at the intersection of research and practice — asking not only how programs are implemented but also how effective they are at improving youth mental health. That dual focus shapes how Grassroot Soccer approaches measurement, partnership, and program design.

The R&D team's approach includes:

• Conducting routine monitoring with 20% of program participants through a short pre- and post-program questionnaire, generating a large enough sample across geographies to support meaningful analysis.
• Partnering with independent researchers, including collaborators at Columbia and University College London, on more rigorous research projects, including a current randomized controlled trial on anxiety and depression interventions for young people funded by the Wellcome Trust.
• Building partnerships with organizations offering complementary approaches — including positive parenting programs, school-based initiatives, and economic strengthening programs — to address the structural realities young people face beyond the program itself.
• Pursuing government relationships and memoranda of understanding, such as a ten-year effort to secure endorsement from South Africa's Department of Basic Education, to legitimize and sustain the organization's work in schools.
• Conducting participatory research with young people, including an interview-based study with 25 teenage boys in Alexandra, Johannesburg, exploring the relationship between masculinity and mental health — with findings co-created and shared by participants themselves as a rap song and music video.

The masculinity study generated insights Barkley describes as things "we just weren't aware of" — including the psychological distress caused by restrictive gender norms and the pressure placed on young men as early as age 15. The findings revealed a gap in Grassroot Soccer's programming, and the organization is now launching a program working with soccer coaches to integrate conversations about masculinity and mental health into their work with teams. Support for coaches themselves has also been a focus: quarterly team-building gatherings, debriefing sessions with psychologists, and a menu of peer support and mindfulness tools reflect a broader mindset shift toward being more aware and sensitive to the mental health and wellbeing needs of staff.

Barkley acknowledges that the organization continues to grapple with its role in addressing the social and structural issues — poverty, unemployment, lack of opportunity — that undermine the wellbeing of the young coaches it works with. He also points to a broader tension in the global health field: a biomedical framework that starts from psychological and psychiatric interventions developed in high-income countries, rather than from the social and relational factors shaping young people's lives. "We would probably suggest less emphasis on pathologizing and diagnosing," he notes, "and think more about their health and wellbeing being tied to a lot of other social and relational factors."