What a transport fund actually does for a girls' football club
· The SFG team
If you want to know whether a community sports programme is real, do not ask about its coaching philosophy. Ask how its players get to training.
Attendance in youth sport is rarely lost in a dramatic moment. It erodes. A session moves to a pitch across town. The rains come. A family's budget tightens and the fare is the first thing to go, because football is the thing that can be dropped and school fees are not. Nobody quits. They just stop being able to come, and then they stop being on the team.
The Chipata transport fund is $2,300 for the year. It exists so that the decision about who trains is not made by geography and bus fare. It is not the line that gets a club noticed by funders, which is roughly why we put it first.
It is also the clearest line to report against. Transport either happened or it did not, it has a cost, and the cost has a receipt. When the club spends from this fund, the expense appears on the project page against the transport line, and raised, spent and available all move. You will be able to see how much of the year it covered.
There is a version of nonprofit storytelling that would rather talk about dreams than bus fares. We think the bus fare is the dream, in the only form that can actually be delivered.