Home Health-Fitness Vanessa Garcia-Brito Is on a Mission to Get—and Keep—Girls in Sports

Vanessa Garcia-Brito Is on a Mission to Get—and Keep—Girls in Sports

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Vanessa Garcia-Brito is bored with the slim lens placed on sports activities. “When individuals hear “sports activities”, a default picture may come to thoughts,” she says. “I wish to say “Life is sport.” Your hurdles will not be on a observe—they may very well be simply getting out of the home, navigating a commute, or just transferring by way of your day. Life itself requires motion, so increasing what “sport” means is essential.”

As Nike’s Chief Social and Impact Officer, getting individuals into sport is actually a part of Garcia-Brito’s job description, and in her phrases “it must be enjoyable… and inclusive.” Hence, increasing how we view it. But additionally, supporting younger athletes in the beginning of their journey. Her greatest problem proper now? Changing the taking part in discipline, fairly actually, for women.

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Vanessa Garcia-Brito taking part in video games with the women.
courtesy of Nike

Garcia-Brito and I meet in Tokyo in October on the Coach the Dream Summit, a robust five-day gathering of sports activities leaders, coaches, and advocates pushed by a shared objective: to ask not solely get extra women into sports activities however preserve them there. The summit, co-hosted with Laureus Sport for Good, brings this mission to life with workshops, discussions, and a play day for native women, who had been stunned with a go to from tennis icon Naomi Osaka and five-time Olympic gold medalist Missy Franklin. For Garcia-Brito, a lawyer by coaching who has spent years constructing community-first packages (she led communications for Nike’s lauded Girl Effect marketing campaign), it’s a second to push her imaginative and prescient ahead. “Urgency is the start line,” she says. Only one in five girls globally obtain the bodily exercise they should thrive—a determine that speaks volumes about each well being and gender fairness.

Her method goes past any single occasion or initiative; it’s about reworking a tradition. This 12 months’s summit launched a brand new teaching information developed with Laureus Sport for Good, constructed on Garcia-Brito’s perception within the “Six Cs” (readability, concise communication, confidence, selection, celebration, and connection). These ideas usually are not simply theoretical; they’re Garcia-Brito’s blueprint for the way coaches, dad and mom, and communities can reshape sports activities to foster resilience, inclusion, and, above all, pleasure. “Girls have advised us they want sports activities to be enjoyable, inclusive, and reflective of who they’re,” she shares. “Especially throughout these years when dropout charges soar, they need to really feel heard and represented.”

Working alongside initiatives like Play Academy with Naomi Osaka—now expanded to Haiti and Los Angeles—Garcia-Brito’s dedication to reshaping women’ sports activities on a world scale comes into focus. Partnerships with manufacturers like Dove and others reinforce her perception in sport as a transformative drive, creating areas the place women really feel they really belong. For Garcia-Brito, igniting this cultural shift goes far past a company mandate; it’s her private mission to drive significant change in communities, one lady, one coach, and one recreation at a time.



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