STRATEGIES
ADVOCACY
Play Advocacy to Parents
Knowledge empowers. Educating parents and caregivers about the significant long term benefits play provides their children is the first step in the process of empowerment and generating positive change.
Not unlike a community WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) campaign, our Play Advocacy to Parents initiative (PAPi) is our core strategy to inform, motivate and support simple adjustments in priorities and habits to affect sustainable healthy outcomes.
The M4: Foundation is partnering with social change experts and professionals in relevant fields to design simple, scalable and contextualized curriculum and promotion strategies to support PAPi. Community advocacy campaigns applying research-based evidence alongside qualitative narratives from trusted influencers focus on themes of attachment, academics, and life achievement, to engender within caregivers the understanding that “it pays to play with your children”.
With a target audience of parents and caregivers, the advocacy strategy will incorporate key community stakeholders, including teachers, pastors, athletes, local administrators and trusted influencers.
“Fathers are one of the best, yet most underutilized child development resources”
– UNICEF
The responsibility for nurturing connections with children is often carried exclusively by the mother due to negligent or absent fathers. As such, unique approaches will be designed to engage male caregivers, with an emphasis on sports and active play while integrating healthy paternal modeling, identity assessment, mentorship and relational accountability.
PLAY ACCESSIBILITY
Play Points
Safe, open-access community play spaces are valuable, yet scarce, commodities for caregivers ready to invest in the many benefits play provides their children.
A Play Point is a simple integrated play-focused ecosystem designed to involve multi-generational participation within a shared space. This might include a sports field for adult and youth play, climbing structures, slides and swings for children, a Lego building block station and sand box for toddlers and infants. Exercise stations with pull up bars and other physical activities for caregivers can be incorporated within the site.
Play Points serve as attractive inclusive community spaces providing a spectrum of age appropriate activities that support connection. They also become vital social platforms where caregivers and children can engage with their peers, nurturing trust, tolerance and affinities within the community’s social root system.
The M4: Foundation is committed to establishing Play Points as fixtures within high-risk neighborhoods to drive sustainable deep impact resulting from connection and play.
COLLABORATION
Open Design Framework
Behind each initiative lies the M:4 Foundation’s conviction that collaboration is more effective and produces greater overall value than unilateral efforts. As such, our methodology incorporates an open design framework – a partner based model integrating inputs from expert contributors within relevant multi-disciplinary sectors. A shared commitment to mission, involving a diversity of expertise, serves to enhance programmatic excellence, sustainability and outcomes, while increasing efficiencies in the expenditure of resources.
This “plug and play” framework provides flexible partnership structures allowing each initiative design to involve cohorts that are context appropriate, consisting of relevant and effective players and community stakeholders. The M4: Foundation is developing a diverse network of expert contributors from within the spaces of psychology, child development, social anthropology, sports, play therapy, family counselling, education, spiritual formation, adult and youth mentorship, public health, urban design, impact monitoring/evaluation and community development.
Aligned by mission, contributors commit to a shared learning environment, reciprocity and transparency. An open-handed multilateral framework helps new tools, program designs and best practices evolve, building the capacities of all stakeholders to better serve future opportunities.
Note:
The M4: Foundation is in the initial phase of launch.