Working Toward World Peace, One Game at a Time

There are many ways to work for world peace. Become a missionary. Feed the homeless. Join the Peace Corps.

For Alison Carney, it’s playing soccer.

Technically, perhaps, it’s coaching soccer – and all that goes with it. Teamwork, fitness, sportsmanship, and health.

The former Healdsburg resident, whose parents live just a couple blocks from downtown in a large 19th century home, has been helping kids from different cultures, religious groups and neighborhoods for five years by using sports to create a legacy of teamwork for some of the world’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged communities.

She’s kept a robust journal of her recent service in Burkina Faso at her online blog here.  This latest project was with Coaching for Hope (CFH), an international organization based in the UK “which uses football to create better futures for young people in West and Southern Africa,” according to their website.

But for Carney, at just 26, CFH is only one of several organizations she’s worked or consulted with over the past several years.

Since graduating from high school in Marin in 2003, she’s been to more countries that many people even know how to spell – first Bosnia-Herzegovina, then Cambodia, Namibia, Uganda, and Rwanda, before her latest project in Burkina Faso, a small impoverished West African nation.

“It’s currently one of the poorest countries in Africa, and I think hitting that bottom tier has really made them recognize that something has to be done,” she said in a recent discussion at her Healdsburg home.

She and parents Richard and Ann Carney, and her three other siblings, have lived in Healdsburg since 1995.

Alison Carney, the oldest, earned her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College (in Massachusetts) in peace & justice studies, “sort of like international relations but with more of a focus on human rights,” she noted.

Among the steps that Burkina Faso is taking to improve the lives of their citizenry is to adopt Carney’s specialty: sports for development programs.

“It’s an amazing tool that you can use to teach kids about inclusion or healthy living or leadership skills,” she said, “without having to put them in a classroom setting and shoving your agenda down their throats… By using sports and playing with them, you’re teaching them life skills that are essential to whatever they want to become.”

Carney began this path while still in high school, working in Bosnia with children of conflict, including refugee children, in soccer camps for girls from age 9 – 12.

In countries where cultural differences are divisive, it’s often the children who are the first to overcome the barriers of cultural identity. In the Bosnia program, the camps encouraged ethnic Serbs and ethnic Croats to play together, building personal bridges through sports.

“It was really successful, they were great,” said Carney proudly. “And the project is still going on -- one of the cool things is, some of the girls I had that first year are now playing for the women’s national team, and helping coach the little girls during the summer program.”

After the Bosnia project, Carney did similar work in Cambodia with the Catholic community in Battambang, two hours out of Phnom Penh, helping integrate community children to working with kids with disabilities. In the past year, she’s been involved in similar projects in several African countries, including Namibia, Uganda, and Rwanda as well as Burkina Faso.

Her interest in human rights comes from family: her father, a former Peace Corps volunteer, is now a contract senior economist with the International Monetary Fund; her mother an international human rights lawyer. They are fully supportive of their daughter's wide-ranging and good-works travels, though not without some worry.

“Parents who care about their children can't help but have some concerns when they are overseas and in unfamiliar cultures,” Richard Carney told me. “Our concerns are assuaged by knowing that Alison has been traveling overseas alone since she was 12, and has developed deep cross-cultural skills and common sense in coping with new environments; and by knowing she is passionate about what she is doing.”

Her mother Ann Carney agreed.

 “I was with her for a few days in 2002 when she literally organized and led the girls soccer camp in Sarajevo," Ann Carney added.  "It was impressive. There was no hesitation, just leadership.”

Between school and her overseas projects, Alison Carney returns to Healdsburg to stay with her family and work locally to earn money to support her interest in human rights projects. She’s worked in local wineries, restaurants, at the and as a coach with

Which brings up the obvious question: is there a place for her international skills in sports development in her home town?

“Absolutely,” she answered. “One of the challenges of local soccer is that we have a very large Hispanic community that plays the sport, and it ends up being a very divided team.

"The Hispanic kids don’t really communicate with the Caucasian kids on the team," she added. "Even the parents have trouble with it.”

What advice does she have to help – recognizing that she’s not just another 26-year-old, but one with years of international experience in divided communities?

“Go personally as a coach to each family -- especially the ones that don’t feel included-- and talk to the parents about what they expect, talk to them about why their kids are playing sports," she said.

“Even one conversation about their expectations for what being on a local soccer team is, or how they want their kids to grow from the experience of local sports," she said. "To get that feedback will automatically make it easier to deal with the families that you have on your team.”

Families. Teams. Communities. Such are the building blocks of Alison Carney’s worldview  -- and, if you think about it, they are building blocks for a future we can all endorse.