ESPN

ESPN’s mission is ‘to serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played’. It has five Corporate Citizenship pillars, two of which are Access through Sports and Leadership. In addition, ESPN is growing, or seeks to grow its presence in a number of global markets. ESPN wanted an ESG strategy that was true to its mission and delivered against the access and leadership pillars, as well as offering genuine employee and community engagement.

We developed a clear understanding of their key markets (existing and new) and business objectives. Through stakeholder interviews we identified existing work, impact made, and the areas where they could do more.

A deeper analysis of their Latin American demonstrated a clear trend of lack of access to safe spaces to play, limited sports programming in those areas most in need, low levels of education and employment and communities that did not feel empowered to lead the changes they desired.

We created a strategy to build accessible and longlasting safe spaces in under-served communities across ESPN’s key markets; developing leadership qualities of youth using high quality sports programming that engages, empowers, develops life skills and provides entry routes into education and employment. The spaces are built by the community and ESPN employees.

Over 10,000 young people have directly benefitted from one of the spaces so far, 6,500 volunteer hours have been contributed from ESPN employees and members of the local community, more than 400 young people have life or job skills programming and 1,500 in educational programming.