Lisa Kiefer interviews co-founders Tim Jahnigen and Lisa Tarver. Their project is to enable play in the most destitute communities for its health benefits. They have designed a nearly indestructable ball, which they give away, to aid the effort.
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Okay. It to the madness is next.
Speaker 2:Okay. [00:00:30] You listening to method to the madness, a biweekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. I'm Lisa Kiefer and today I'm interviewing Tim Yon again and Lisa Tarver, cofounders of one world football now one world play.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 4:[00:01:00] Berkeley innovators, Tim again and Lisa Tarver launched oneworld football during the 2010 world cup from a vision that Tim had after seeing new stories about the plight of children in war zones, refugee camps, and harsh inner city environment around the world, research has shown that whether you're a child soldier, [00:01:30] sex slave, or gang member, the only therapy that helps us rediscover our humanity is to simply play. Tim found that although there are plenty of organizations that offer play therapy to refugee camps and inner city youth, there's nothing to play with because the environment is so harsh and inflated. Ball has an average life span of about an hour and remote locations or lack of resources mean it can take months to find replacements to solve this problem. Tim and Lisa started the oneworld football [00:02:00] project and created the world's first ultra durable ball with their B Corp status, meaning triple bottom line of people, planet and profits, and through the help of founding sponsor Chevrolet as well as a global network of partners and they're buy one give one customers.
Speaker 4:They have managed to distribute over a million balls to communities around the world after assessing the impacts of their efforts. Tim and Lisa have found that regardless [00:02:30] of geography or culture play forms stronger individuals, builds better communities and create a much more positive future. The oneworld football project, it's just the first step toward realizing a larger goal more than just equipment. They now want to help bring the transformative power of play into people's lives. Thus, they are changing their name from one world football project to one world play project, changing the name to expand the mission products, services [00:03:00] that enable play in all of its forms anywhere and everywhere around the globe. I was lucky enough to have Tim and Lisa join me here in the calyx studio.
Speaker 1:Can you talk a little bit about
Speaker 4:the international challenges you've had, getting this ball out and then we're going to talk about where your next evolution is to one world play. [00:03:30] Sure. One world football project works with organizations all over the world. And actually I'd love to talk not just about the challenges but about how amazing it is, um, to be working with a network of, uh, you know, hundreds of larger organizations and literally thousands of small organizations. You know, we work with everything from, um, save the children and United Nations, you know, UNICEF and Unh cr, everything from that to tiny little organizations that [00:04:00] work in one community with 50 kids. Like even here in the u s Oakland maybe or Berkeley. Exactly, exactly. It's worldwide. I mean, we've, we've delivered one real footballs to over 70 countries in large quantities, meaning 5,000 or more balls in some cases. Um, you know, 50, 60,000 to a country.
Speaker 4:We, in September, we delivered our millionth ball in South Africa together with Chevrolet, which was a huge milestone because we, we don't give [00:04:30] balls to individual children. They all go to organizations that work with disadvantaged communities. We average about 30 children per ball, which means that over 30 million children and young people are having the opportunity to play your evolution now is going from one world football to one world play. What is that all about? When we started out and when Tim had the idea for the ball, we just saw that it was the ball and we knew the ball was a tool and that we needed to [00:05:00] get it out to kids and children in all of us. I mean, we all need to play. So it's not just limited to children all over the world and particularly in the harshest environments. And that's really what it was designed for.
Speaker 4:What we've realized and learn through the process is, um, you know, we knew play was important, but we hadn't realized the depth of that concept and how important it really was. You know, children having the opportunity to play when they faced trauma of, you know, [00:05:30] being coming orphan, seeing their parents killed in a war situation or ending their families ending up in refugee camps. Play is so fundamental to recovering not only physical but mental and psychological health, spiritual health and to becoming whole again and not only for the individual but for communities as well. So as we've expanded our understanding of play, we're becoming the one we'll play project we see not
Speaker 5:only delivering the football, but [00:06:00] being a vehicle for all kinds of opportunity for play. So whether that's other balls or sports products, whether that's play spaces, supporting play in lots of different ways and [inaudible] and encouraging dialogue about play and supporting other people who are doing work around play. I mean we see even in our, you know, in schools in the u s play has been almost virtually eliminated sports programs, music, which is another form of play, afterschool programs, they're all just being cut out. Kids don't learn if they can't play. What's your [00:06:30] first initiative as one world play? We have several things in the pipeline. For example, the second most played sport on earth after football or soccer is cricket. Most people have no idea, you know. So we've gone on the ground. In fact, our, my director of product development who helps take my brain dump and turn it into reality.
Speaker 5:He's in India right now doing the final testing on this ball. This ball looks and function. It looks just like a traditional cricket ball, but everything about it's engineering [00:07:00] has nothing to do with what we, what we know of as a cricket ball because cricket balls are rock hard about the size of an American hardball and they're made for playing on big open space. But hundreds of millions of people, 700 million people play cricket in India. Uh, hundreds of millions of people around the world play this sport in little alleyways and courtyards. So it's small children and old folks standing around watching the game. And if they got hit with a ball like that, it could hurt them very badly or damage the small cardboard shacks [00:07:30] that these people are living in as well. So we had to, we had to see what they were actually playing with, which is like a tennis ball, but that bounced too high.
Speaker 5:So we had to make it a little heavier than a tennis ball. And take some of the bounce out and so on. So we actually went on the ground around the world and saw with the majority of humanity's actually in reality playing with, that's the same with the soccer ball and we're working on several other things. So you'll see things coming up. Some of the things I'd love to be shouting from the rooftops about right now, but okay. So, um, where do you do your manufacturing for [00:08:00] all of this equipment? We would have done it right here at home in the states, but there was no real machinery any longer in the states that works with this particular material. We started off with our closest neighbor. There was a, there was a company in Canada that, uh, had a machine that was, had some knowledge of how to work with this material, but we found we needed to evolve to a higher level of actual knowledge and innovation expertise.
Speaker 5:We ended up moving production to an extraordinary group of, uh, to an extraordinary manufacturing partner [00:08:30] that we work with in Taiwan. But it actually costs us more to make the ball there than it started off with. In Canada, we weren't concerned about bringing down the price per se because first of all, this is the first change in ball technology in nearly a thousand years. Therefore, there is no comparison. You cannot compare the two. It's apples and oranges. The only thing it has in common with the common inflated ball is the Word Ball and the shape. Everything else about it is different. Therefore, it just costs what it costs and [00:09:00] the purpose. This ball out of context, even though it's the first really high tech version of that, one of the oldest objects in our, in history, in our evolution, it is. It's an entirely different process and we're only competing against ourselves.
Speaker 5:If we were to just be a commercial product, we would have to spend an extraordinary amount of money and fight for shelf space, but this is something entirely different. We don't look at this as a nice to have. This is fulfilling a biological imperative. We call this [00:09:30] ball social nutrition when it hits the ground. In order for us to meet the global population, the need for play on a social nutrition level worldwide, which is as important as food and medicine and shelter, which people 25 and under who live in abject poverty and war zones and gang territories, inner city right here in the u s and so on, worldwide 25 and under down to infants is two and a half billion people and at 30 people per ball, it's more than 80 million balls are needed just to fulfill a basic human need. [00:10:00] This is not even about rights rights can be negotiated. There is no gray area here. In order for us to fulfill that through partnerships, every major corporation who can sponsor and so on, everybody gets to be the hero for that, for the rest of our generation.
Speaker 4:So now that we're not just one real football project but one role play project and we're branching out beyond the, the initial idea of the soccer ball or football into other products, other types of activities and play spaces and other ideas of [00:10:30] how to provide opportunity for play. Um, with the idea of reaching that much more quickly on that much more of that population that globally that needs to have the opportunity to play. It's interesting that you say it's manufactured in Taiwan because I was reading that the, the earliest ball that they have found was what is now China, but it's something like 8,000 years ago they found evidence of a playing ball in China that is exploring what is now China. Yeah. And so when you talk about the theory of play, [00:11:00] I mean, you know, we've, we didn't really start analyzing it until Socrates actually, and um, Aristotle had writings about play, the, the, the idea play and its importance, but to evolve, as you guys probably know over the years, it wasn't really until the 1990s that it became known that it was used, usable for conflict resolution. And now of course the um, the data is amazing saying that the entire neocortex lights up during [00:11:30] play for not just us, all mammals and that it is necessary for evolution, particularly for social animals, pro social. So I'm sure you guys have done a lot of this kind of academic research. Who are you working with in the theory of play today and what do you, what do you know about the science of play?
Speaker 5:We are reading and studying as much of the best work that's out there. There, there are some really seminal works that go back 30 or 40 years, but more recently the [00:12:00] work of Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the, uh, National Institute for play is an extraordinary source and a resource for us. And we are privileged to the early days of discussions of collaborations with him and his work directly. But there are so many incredible people around the world on the ground whose knowledge and ideas haven't even been put on paper yet. And that's the privilege for us. I mean, play is used for not just conflict resolution and [00:12:30] Lisa can speak more to the all the variety of ways, uh, with all these incredible organizations. They're doing some of the most important social impact work on the planet today, but they're anonymously doing it in a way that the people on the ground in the Congo, in Palestine and is real letting children Palestinian-Israeli children mixed together and so on.
Speaker 5:It only takes about 20 minutes of play to actually break down all the barriers of assumptions about race, gender, religion, [00:13:00] culture, language, all of those things go away. This just happens to be the centennial of the Christmas Day. Truths of the first Christmas Day, truce of World War One happened. It's an extraordinary phenomenon among other things. One of the final things that happened on that incredible day is about 40 or 50 combatants from the allies, the British and the and, and the Germans kick a, an old leather ball around in the no man's land for about all of half an hour. And that's all it took. So the next day when [00:13:30] the war was supposed to start again at dawn, those 40 to 50 guys could not shoot at each other. They had to replace them on the front in order to get the war going again. And that's a profound historic fact. You know, we have historic evidence of even going back to the truces that were called for the earliest Olympics. They used to call a halt to hostilities so that they could go home and, and compete. And that was what the Olympics used to be about. He actually is a standing statute that they're supposed to be a cessation of violence during the Olympics.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think in the [00:14:00] 19th century they actually thought play was a precursor to learning how to fight in battle. So we've come completely in an opposite direction as to what the real reason behind play is. Evolutionarily we do, as Tim said, we, you know, work with Stuart Brown. We're part of the U s play coalition. You know, we are certainly doing our own theoretical research, but really a lot of what we feel that we bring to the table is the on the ground experience with all of the organizations [00:14:30] that we work with. And um, the, the, you know, we not only provide the ball, which is really just a tool for them to use in their programs. So we work with organizations, for example, in Haiti together with the Tony Sana Foundation, Tony Sauna being a former u s soccer player, his foundation working with a group called the Haitian initiative and we've provided balls to them.
Speaker 4:They're working in [inaudible]. It's the largest, one of the largest slums in the western hemisphere. Uh, just goes on for miles and miles and miles. [00:15:00] It's somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 people live there. Incredibly dangerous, no running water, no electricity, gang warfare, um, drugs. Just really, really very challenging circumstances. What Haitian initiative is doing is working with young people. They have to stay in school in order to participate in the program. They come after school every day and they get soccer training and they get quite high level training. Um, Tony and other people are there, [00:15:30] you know, he's there periodically and, and they've received training for their coaches. They get tutoring if they need it. The directors of the program, if they, they have to turn in their, their report cards and if they're have, if they're struggling in school, they get home visits, they get tutoring, they get a hot meal, which is sometimes their only meal of the day.
Speaker 4:I had the opportunity to visit the program in, in May and they are so engaged and grateful for the opportunity that they're having, [00:16:00] but they're learning so much through it that these kids all talk about how, um, how they want to give back. The kids there in the program are becoming the coaches and they're staying in school and they're graduating and they're going to college and they're getting, having new opportunities all through this, what's at the core, apparently a soccer program. And so that this is just in the four years since you've started this, I assume you're measuring the success so that you have a body of research [00:16:30] to fall back Zackly right, exactly. So we have, we not only deliver the balls, but then we work after the fact to see where they are, what's working, what's working. Um, what kinds of programs, what, you know, testimonials, all kinds of documentation.
Speaker 4:And through the monitoring evaluation, are you reaching places that are hard to reach, like Iran and North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Are you in those areas or can you be, and how do you get into these challenging areas [00:17:00] with these balls? Yes, as many of them as possible. We can't ship to countries that are on the, unfortunately on the u s you know, no trade lists. So, um, Iran and North Korea have not been possible, although we have partners that are very interested. We could, if it was, you know, legally possible, but other places, you know, we, Tim and I just visited Chad. We have containers that are balls about 15,000 balls that are on their way there right now. Um, we visited the, the [00:17:30] [inaudible] refugee camps on the border with Sudan and talk about remote locations. I mean, there is nothing, you just fly for hours in a little plane over desert. And these camps are in the middle of nowhere. No roads, no roads, no, I mean it's just, you know, the, the vehicles you're just driving across the sand.
Speaker 5:There is nothing there but it with armed convoy to get out there. But we're working with the UNH CR who takes in all their materials and so we get the containers [00:18:00] to country and they said, no problem. We'll get them to the camps. So you know, the ball's always go to the places your balls are shipped to? No. On the ground. No. In fact, at the, at the beginning it, you know, when we were operating on a shoe string, you know, we'd hear stories from everybody, but we were pretty much just based here and, um, and not getting out into the field. And it takes a lot to get there and we couldn't go every place. So we also have, you know, we have a regional office in Kenya and in Thailand [00:18:30] and Brazil. So our regional people are out in the field as well.
Speaker 5:And indeed you start the regional thing or have you always had distribution? Like I guess we started our second year just in Kenya and then we added the other offices as we went along. We'd managed to get balls for example, using common sense and trusted freight forwarding partners and so on. There was an NGO that helped us get balls into Mogadishu, into Somalia. A country that has no functioning government, they're [00:19:00] still doing business, right. Goods are coming and going. So there are ways and we've gotten balls into eastern Congo, some of the harshest places on earth. Gosh, I can imagine that you guys would be great guests at the u n sometimes speaking. Had they ever asked you to come out and speak about this? Oh, actually bragged that my wife, I already spoke at the UN, but she was at a conference that was happening in at the facility, but it wasn't, it wasn't a UN conference addressing the cause.
Speaker 5:It's the very thing that they are always trying to do is find ways to bring reconciliation and peace. [00:19:30] Well they actually have their own, the UN has its own conference on sport for Development and peace and so you know, we attend and we're part of that movement. Sport for peace and development is likely the single largest, one of the largest movements on earth that really nobody knows about. But there's so many governments and celebrities and powerful organizations doing it right now, right under our noses. We just don't know the term for it. And why do you think so many people don't know about this? What is the barrier there? That's [00:20:00] a good question. Isn't the news picking this up? The news doesn't cover the good things to cover the catastrophes and the murders and everything else and you and we don't have a culture of celebrating play and celebrating the positive and celebrating the growth.
Speaker 5:So it's people like you who are giving us the opportunity to talk about it and how important it is. There's so many new brain studies now about play that that. I'm just curious why that hasn't been more out in the forefront, but it will be asked to do with, I think [00:20:30] our enculturation, Western values are based on, you know, work and children shall be seen and not heard and things like that. It's true. And the puritans believed that play was sinful, so they separated it. Right? And so you know, we're about celebrating every form of play. And the fact is play is so important of the top 10 things you must do. You can find this in the UN literature. When you're setting up a refugee camp, you have to, you know, you have 10 things you have to do. The first three things most westerners focus on, which is food, medicine and shelter.
Speaker 5:[00:21:00] They triage that immediately. But school doesn't come til six or seven on that list of top 10 things. The fourth thing that you have to do, not separately but simultaneously, is play. The minute you bring a ball into a situation where you have what they call an improvised community in chaos because even a refugee camp, it may be the same country like uh, in Syria, but they may come from different neighborhoods. So it's not like you can just throw them all together and they may practice different religions or different sects of religion. It's not a homogenous thing. So [00:21:30] people whose lives have been turned upside down, they're so stressed. As soon as you put a ball on the ground, immediately structure and normalcy, it keeps them grounded in honorable conflict resolution, which they know how to do through the play and it gets stress relief and all that creativity, everything. So you must do those things simultaneously. That's how important it is.
Speaker 4:You've told me about your inspiration for this company and now I'm curious, how did you two find each other? Cause you obviously have similar aspirations. Well we actually met when we were 16 [00:22:00] but didn't get together until we were 40 42. Yes.
Speaker 5:Journeys of our own. That led us on very quite different geographies and different paths, but very similar outcomes.
Speaker 4:You were both in El Salvador for some time, is that correct? I lived, I lived in El Salvador for five. Tim has visited, but the, when you were in El Salvador you were working on a lot of projects for people in need of help, but can you talk about that just a little bit, what you were doing there? Sure. I mean my, my background is in the Israeli, in [00:22:30] primarily the nonprofit work and both in the u s and in El Salvador. I lived there for more than five years before that. I spent a lot of time there, traveled there extensively, including during the war and at some of the most intense times in the war and you know, was working with, and as part of the u s solidarity movement at the time, we took delegations and groups down that provided, uh, not only support but a physical presence in support of trade unions and farm worker [00:23:00] organizations and displaced communities that were displaced by the war, internal refugees having a presence there would many times keep those people safe.
Speaker 4:So it was very, it was a very direct form of support, not theoretical. It's like our bodies are in this office, maybe it's not going to get bombed today. We're in this demonstration, we're marching down the street with you. We're showing our solidarity, keeps the National Guard from opening fire on the delegation, you know, so that direct connection and, and then I [00:23:30] ended up moving to El Salvador and I lived there for five and a half years. You know, living in, you know, a country that's has, that's very resource poor with tremendous poverty. You know, you're directly connected with and seeing on a day to day basis how, how most of the world lips so can see where
Speaker 5:your evolution to this kind of a concept would happen. And I had traveled the world, I lived in Europe, in north, in Norway for years, but I worked on a cruise ship when I was in my twenties that went around the world five times in the four years that I worked on it. So I got to see firsthand [00:24:00] how really the most of the world lives, which is in abject poverty. I just came from that direct experience. The truth of the origin of the the ball too is that, you know, I had the vision after seeing this story, but we were not financially able to pursue it at the time. We have another startup at the time and based on another technology that I'd come up with. And so we were focusing on that and we just couldn't, there was no way to do it. And, but I also work in the music business as a lyricist and producer and two years later during an amazing breakfast that we were invited to with [00:24:30] somebody that I helped work with in production for staying, uh, one of the most extraordinary people on earth.
Speaker 5:He and his wife are just amazing people. Anyway, we were, Lisa and I were invited to breakfast and we were having just a random rambling conversation about things that we were thinking about and wanting to do when he shared with me a story about how he and some friends had helped finance the building of a soccer field in Gaza because he knew that it was important for children to have someplace to play in these places. And I went, wow. Well that's interesting because two years ago I saw this [00:25:00] news story that broke my heart, but inspired me to use this material someday to make a ball that will never go flat. And that was it. And all of a sudden he stopped. He goes, wait a minute, did you just tell me that you know how to make a ball that'll never go flat? And I said, well, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 5:It's a theory. He goes, you need to do that right now and if you will, I'll finance that. I mean, it was, you're not even, not even 60 seconds. He didn't even, this was not planned. This was all just serendipity. We were just invited to breakfast and we were talking about, you know, literature and family and children [00:25:30] and you know, anything but music. And um, and we've even donated some of the balls to their, the projects that they're working on because wherever children are a ball should be. So we were very open about who delivers it. So he later he gave the ball the name that it has one world because I had all these other names and I wouldn't have been so bold to say one world, which is, you know, it's a pretty bold name, but I sent him this list of names and he, I said, what would you call it?
Speaker 5:You understood what it was, you tell me. And he said, how about one world? And I said, fine, but you got [inaudible] give [00:26:00] me license to use your song. Did He, I guess he did. He said, fine. You know, boom. So that's our theme song. Oh, that's really great. Yeah. Congratulations. I mean, and it's so natural and organic and it's so human. What an extraordinary thing. And I think the first thought that went through my head conscious after I've almost passed out hearing that he wanted me to do this, you know, I wasn't, it was just mind blowing. The first actual thought that I was able to conjure was, please God make this so successful that I can do for someone else what he just did [00:26:30] for me. Yeah. That's Nice Tim and Lisa, I really appreciate you being on this program. So glad you're in Berkeley and I know you're about to leave the country for or this project. I know there's a lot of listeners out there are going to want to get ahold of you or look at your website. Can you give us some information where
Speaker 4:people should go if they want to either help out or just read about you, what should they do? Of course, our website is one world play project.com and that's where they can find us. There's lots of information, there's lots of great stories and videos and what the impact [00:27:00] is that we're having already. Um, with the one role football and we are all about collaboration. You know, we welcome ideas and initiatives and uh, you know, the ball is available for sale as a buy one give one. So for everyone that's purchased, we donate a ball to one of the organizations that we work with. And we also work with lots of different kinds of organizations on campaigns. So for example, if there's an organization that wants to do something, a great way to become involved is to reach out to their supporters and, and let them know what [00:27:30] we're doing and encourage people to either buy a ball for themselves and we donate one or to just give a ball. We have that option as well. We can host that campaign on our website and it's, it's a fun way to work together and a great way to get started. So in lots of other ways to become involved too. So we welcome all kinds of initiatives.
Speaker 5:I just want to encourage all entrepreneurs out there who have vision that have a belief that they can do something that actually helps people to, to really look into how you can be a B corporation [00:28:00] and how you can find a way to do well and do good at the same time. Also to realize that it's, it is a team. We have an extraordinary team. Everything that we do from shipping to, you know, sales, everything. Because it's such a new world of doing business this way. We actually have to make it up as we go along. We have to use best practices, but we have to make a hybridization. We're learning as we go. There is no template. There was nobody, you know, there's, we're throwing bread comes behind us and we're, we're available to answer questions and to [00:28:30] encourage people, but our time is so limited as well. So we can't always respond quickly. But the point is that the need is there. The opportunity, especially when we put play in its pride perspective, I believe that there's a, there's a future that has a, an opportunity for innovation that would make the innovation of Silicon Valley and the dotcoms almost insignificant compared to the, when you actually take play into consideration when you're developing and moving forward. Thank you for being on the program.
Speaker 1:[00:29:00] [inaudible]
Speaker 2:you just heard Berkeley innovators, Tim Yon again and Lisa Tarver Co founders of one world play contract. I'm Lisa Kiefer and I have been your host for method to the madness, a biweekly public affairs show on k a l [00:29:30] x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. If you have questions or comments about this show, go to the Calex website, find method to the madness and drop us an email.
Speaker 3:Tune in again in two weeks at the same time, have a great weekend.
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