When Kalyani Subramanyam created the Young People’s Initiative in 2006, it was with the aim to empower girls and young women through the medium of sport — specifically, netball.
This was part of her involvement with Naz Foundation’s programme to use sport for development, she says. But the advent of COVID-19, which forced Naz to scale back on the YPI programme, put a spanner in the works.
For Kalyani, it was imperative that the programme continue. “We’d experienced how sports has shaped our personalities,” she recalls about her time playing basketball in school. “When you come together as a team, strategise, win — or even when you don’t win — sports offers the ability to come together and be strong.”
At the time, Kalyani was also closely working with Corina van Dam, a sports instructor from the Netherlands. The duo decided that YPI, which till then had grown to encompass 1,15,000 girls, had to carry on its good work.
While searching for a…