Grassroots Diplomacy through Coach Education: Americans, Jordanians and Tajiks

Two coach-to-coach sport diplomacy exchange programmes run between 2012 and 2015 in Jordan Tajikistan, funded by U.S. State Department’s International Sports Programming Initiative, used soccer to promote grassroots diplomacy. These programmes focused on leadership, tolerance, diversity, and citizenship, as well as training coaches to design sport for development and peace programmes in their local communities while learning more about other cultures and building relationships in the process. These two case studies demonstrate how grassroots diplomacy attempts have both succeeded and struggled in the mission to build relationships among people, empower young people and their mentors to be local agents of social change, and strengthen community-based social institutions.