This year marks a decade since The Atlas Foundation was first registered as a UK charity—a period of time that has flown by incredibly quickly! Over the years, we have been privileged and honoured to benefit from endless support, advocacy, and time contributed by an army of volunteers, fundraisers, Atlas Champions, our wonderful trustees, and partner organisations around the globe.
We thought a fitting way to reflect on the outcomes we’ve achieved in ten short years would be to recap what we have delivered thus far as a global family of rugby players, fans, sports advocates, and community leaders and highlight some of the real results we’ve seen in some of the world’s most disadvantaged areas.
While the big-picture numbers are always a matter of pride, it is those individual stories of challenge, inequality, struggle, and disadvantage—and how meaningful, sustained support makes a life-changing impact—that demonstrate why we do what we do and the difference it makes to the lives of children.
Celebrating Our Successes After a Decade of Dedicated Effort
As everybody involved with the Foundation will know, our focus is on supporting children who face any number of disparities in their everyday lives. These can range from poverty and hunger, a lack of access to healthcare and education, inequality and disparity, and exposure to violence, disease, famine, abuse and neglect.
Needless to say, our shared vision is a world where every child is safe, happy, loved, and healthy and has a world of opportunity and aspiration to look forward to, but we recognise this simply isn’t the case in far too many places.
Tangible Outcomes Achieved by The Atlas Foundation Since 2014
With that in mind, the targeted work we and our partners, alongside the Atlas Champions, UK team, and trustees, have achieved has all built towards that mission. We have:
- Directly supported 219,203 children. We believe that rounding that figure up or down detracts from the reality that our small team has helped disadvantaged children at a scale equivalent to the population of a town the size of Northampton, Reading or Luton.
- Worked in collaboration with 47 international partners, including schools, community groups, sports coaches and leaders, advocates, healthcare teams and non-profit organisations – all of whom extend our reach into the heart of communities where children need us most.
- Actioned projects in 21 countries, in destinations as diverse as India, South Africa, Malawi, Thailand, Kenya, the USA, Eswatini, and here in England and Ireland.
Digging deeper into those numbers illustrates how we enact change that isn’t short-term or a form of temporary respite from hardship. Instead, our projects shape the way children learn, engage with the world around them, follow the guidance of leaders, and build a better world on their own terms.
For instance, 100% of our partners work in unity with schools, 95% of children graduate their school year, and 88% of partners provide access to nutrition and clean water. The promotion of health and exercise is a priority across 100% of our projects, with 46% supplying female hygiene products, 65% delivering extracurricular skills coaching, and 88% providing free kits, supporting an inclusive balance of 53% male and 47% female children.
Seeing children graduate school, learn new capabilities, benefit from sustainable access to education, food, and safe water, overcome barriers to engagement and participation, recognise their skills and values, and be mentored by leaders who promote healthy relationships, self-worth, and aspiration is truly something special.
Reviewing Individual Projects and Outcomes Over Our 10-Year History
This feels like a great time to feature just a tiny selection of our projects over the years, each with a very different purpose, objective, and mission. This highlights why locally led work, sustainable targeting, and partnership working are such foundational aspects of our mission.
The Water and Healthcare (WAH) Foundation in Cambodia
We’ll start with the WAH Foundation, a project launched in 2009 in Kampong Chhnang in central Cambodia. It is a life-changing, long-term effort to install and maintain clean water systems with ultra-filtration functions.
This remarkable team has installed clean water systems in 49 healthcare centres, three major hospitals, and 240 schools, providing training and collaborating with health and medical teams delivering specific treatments like cleft-lip repair and cataract surgery in underserved communities.
The Atlas Foundation identified the similarities in our visions and efforts and began a hugely beneficial partnership. This supports faster and greater rollouts of both education and clean water filtration, ensuring that children always have safe water to drink, are not exposed to severe water-borne disease. To date we have achieved an 85% reduction in these life-threatening illnesses.
TackleLondon, England
Our next featured project is a partnership with TackleLondon, an initiative working with children in London from age six to young adults of 24. This initiative creates change for those exposed to adversity, inequality, and lack of opportunity and helps them develop supportive and healthy relationships within schools, sports clubs, and their communities.
TackleLondon, of course, has a shared passion for the power of rugby, making it a natural fit for our work here at The Atlas Foundation. We have collated our resources to develop mentoring projects and worked hand in hand with rugby clubs and schools in boroughs with high levels of social disadvantage, poverty and neglect.
While this project is relatively new, we are excited to see what quantifiable outcomes we can achieve, particularly for children who are struggling, under pressure to make poor life decisions, and can improve their own futures through a combination of safeguarding, positive development, mentoring, coaching, and access to resources.
SKRUM, Eswatini: Pass the Ball, Not the Virus
Finally, we are delighted to partner with SKRUM in Eswatini, where HIV/AIDS infection rates are the highest in the world, impacting 28.8% of the population. This has created a shockingly low life expectancy of 51, in a country where 45% of children are considered orphans and/or vulnerable.
The project was launched in 2008 by Michael Collinson, who has been instrumental in developing rugby in Eswatini as a tireless coach, advocate, and leader. Michael was also awarded the Spirit of Rugby award in 2001 by the World Rugby governing body. SKRUM works with children across over 600 schools to improve outcomes, address healthcare inequalities, break down taboos, and give them access to a healthier future.
This partnership has provided vital care, information and education to 23,313 children, ensuring they are empowered to protect and manage their own health and have accessible, inclusive learning opportunities – with a 52% reduction in HIV cases.
We hope you have enjoyed reading about these success stories as much as we have loved sharing them. We welcome you to visit the Our Impact and Our Work pages, where you’ll find many more inspiring stories of hope, opportunity, and accomplishment—all of which we intend to build on over the next ten years.
