India’s CROSSOVER ACADEMY is providing kids with life lessons through the sport of basketball.
Shaun Jayachandran started with a modest and open-ended objective: get kids to play sports and stay in school. As basketball continued to grow as a global sport, he looked at the landscape and wanted to get involved. “I started thinking about how I could combine my work in education with coaching and having a family history in India to build something that would be impactful,” he recalls. From that kernel of an idea, the Crossover Academy was born. In 2012, Shaun took two volunteers to India to run the pilot program with 45 students. Now in his sixth summer, Shaun rolls with 14 volunteers who come to southeastern India for two weeks in the middle of the summer to teach basketball to over 300 children from marginalized communities and provide them with hope for a better future.
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