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.

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."