Kick for Charity….Fantastic soccer camp enrolling now for 2015

What happens when you combine youthful enthusiasm, entrepreneurial energy and a desire to make a difference? In Palo Alto, where even teenagers execute on their lofty visions, you get Kick For Charity, a new soccer camp that manages to be fun and inspiring at the same time. Kick For Charity was founded by local high school sophomores Ari Momeny, Eli Friedlander, Cristobal Gonzalez​, and Siddharth Srinivasan, who first learned their potential as fundraisers in middle school, when they organized a soccer tournament that drew over 50 players and contributed to a classwide effort that netted about $15,000 for Heifer International.

With a desire to recreate that powerful experience, when the friends were freshmen in high school (split between Gunn and Paly but all playing for Palo Alto Soccer Club), they came up with an idea of a charity soccer camp for kids. They recruited two female friends to help get the camp off the ground (Cassidy Kornfield and Alys Olmstead) and then dispatched the details of planning everything with teenage speed and resourcefulness. Pick a charity? Done. They chose charity: water due to its efficiency, where 100% of all donations go directly towards water efforts in the developing world.  Build a website? Done. They created a registration page that would allow parents to send their camp fee ($150 per week) directly to charity: water. Recruit students? Easy. With a modest goal the first year of having 25 campers, the founders relied on emails to elementary schools, and word of mouth through their soccer club.

Oh and all the other stuff that might derail adults, like liability, finding a field and planning the camp? Kick for Charity ticked off these items through a combination of free legal advice (a parent lawyer helped create a watertight waiver), winging it (using an empty field at Pardee Park) and confidence (how hard could it be to run a soccer camp?).

“Palo Alto is a strange place,” explains Ariya about how it all came together. “The media is always writing about how teenagers are drinking and doing drugs, but kids here are different. We have had tons of support from our friends, even though no one is getting paid.”

And their efforts are creating real impact: Kick for Charity has raised $11,000 since it began and doubled its enrollment from one week with 25 kids in 2013 to two weeks serving a total of about 56 students in 2014. The 2015 coaching roster includes nine counselors who will run all aspects of the camp, from filling water balloons to serving snack and planning the games.

But beyond the fundraising, Kick for Charity has one main goal for their campers: to have fun. Speaking perhaps from first-hand knowledge, the counselors explained, “Kids don’t always get a say in the camps they go to and some are overly structured. We wanted this camp to be different.” This mission is being accomplished without question, according to the campers we met.

“Other camps are strict, but this is so relaxed,” said Avery. “I love all the choices, like we can play a scrimmage or game or just take a break if we are hot or tired.” Added her friend Nicky, “The counselors go to high school so they are like kids too!” The girls also commented on how the mixture of female and male counselors helped integrate the kids on the playing fields in a way that was different from other sports camps. The boys were just as enthusiastic about Kick for Charity. Ten-year old Michael said, “This camp is not as focused on skills- it’s more about playing soccer games with your friends.” One girl named Siri liked how the camp was helping kids in other countries. “It feels good that we are helping other people because children in Africa don’t have clean water.”

As counselor Alys Olmstead explained, “Palo Alto is a unique place- parents want their kids to know about how lucky they are to live here and find chances to give back to others.”

It was clear from our visit that while the campers are having a great time at Kick For Charity, the camp may be equally as powerful for young people who are running it.“This has been an incredibly rewarding experience,” Sid and Cristobal told Palo Alto Pulse. “We’ve been able to raise a lot of money for Charity:Water, but more than that, we’ve grown so much as counselors from working with these wonderful kids and parents.”

And the teens are already planning for the future. “We want to build a pipeline of high school counselors who can continue to manage Kick for Charity even after we go to college,” Ari and Eli explained. “That way we could help plan the camp during the school year and then run it when we come back to Palo Alto in the summer. We are excited to continue expanding the camp and raising more money as we grow.”

All photos by Jim Migdal