Caitlin Morris, Vice President, Social & Community Impact, Nike
Nike isn’t just the largest athletic apparel company in the world. It’s the largest sports brand in the world, outpacing any company, team or league. When the Swoosh moves, so does planet sports.
Project Play was made possible by Nike, one of the original backers of our Aspen Institute initiative. In 2013, youth sport participation rates were declining rapidly, kids just weren’t getting enough exercise, and the implications of the childhood obesity crisis were becoming clear. Worse, the issues of access to sport and high early attrition rates weren’t even on the radar of key stakeholders with the capacity to address them – professional leagues, media companies, government, philanthropy, and schools.
Nike’s support signaled that we all need to pay attention to this. And we all need to own it. That no one entity, not even Nike, could solve these problems alone. So, at the invitation of the Institute, Caitlin Morris joined several dozen other leaders in Aspen to develop a plan.
Morris is now Nike’s Vice President of Social and Community Impact, guiding a global team and diverse portfolio of programs that come to life through partnerships that aim to build active kids and inclusive communities. She will be a featured panelist at this year’s Project Play Summit, at which Nike is, fittingly, Presenting Sponsor.
In a Project Play 2024 Member Spotlight interview, Morris sat down with Tom Farrey, executive director of the Sports & Society Program, to reflect on what was – and what’s next. Below are excerpts from their conversation, edited for brevity.
Tom Farrey: As a Project Play original, what do you remember from that meeting 10 years ago?
Caitlin Morris: I remember quite a bit. I remember that the feeling in the room was electric. One of the things that you’re really good at, Tom, is using your convening power to bring the right people into a room. You thought, at that first meeting, that you were just going to get our input and you’d put out a report. And the feeling in the room was “No, no, no, we want to operationalize this. We want to make it real.” The reason we’re here 10 years later is because in that first meeting the people you put in the room were committed to making real change.
The other thing I remember is going to dinner that night with someone who asked, “Is it really that big a deal? Are kids really dropping out of sport?” And now this person is one of the biggest champions you have out there. When you think about movement-building, a big part of it is how you get the people with the most at stake aligned on message, and Project Play has been tremendous at doing that.
Tom: With Nike’s help. One of the pieces of advice your team gave us was, get your message straight. Make it tight, simply worded. Then say it over and over and over, the same way. Which is what we’ve done with the Sport for All, Play for Life report and its 8 Plays. That was a key insight for us, in terms of how to build a movement.
Caitlin: Project Play is a great example of an exceptional partnership that has been rooted in research, cross-sector collaboration, and collective action. And really, we’re so proud to have played an integral role in getting it started.
Tom: At the time, what were you hoping that Project Play could achieve?
Caitlin: What I saw in Project Play was a real opportunity for us to create an actionable framework and help change the conversation, because if parent attitudes and the business of support don’t change it's going to be hard for us to get kids to have a different experience with sport.
Project Play really brought a collaborative approach. And now Made to Play, which is Nike’s commitment to giving kids that inclusive experience, has more than 120 community partners around the world. A lot of them are in the Project Play network, whether it's the Center for Healing and Justice through Sport, Laureus, U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, etc. So much of what we did in North America was looking at the framework (Project Play) built with the first report and figuring out, “how are we going to operationalize that?”
Tom: How do you look at the impact of Project Play?
Caitlin: We have to look at the cumulative progress made over the last 10 years, and the first part is around changing the conversation. Project Play has gotten the issues much more front and center. Some of my team shared the recent New York Times article around the equity gap created in play and sport. Project Play has been talking about that for years and (the Times) relied heavily on data that Aspen produced. That's going to change the consciousness at a different level.
The other piece is around how to actually bring things to practical life, at both a national and local scale. I think your team’s State of Play reports that have come out at a city level have been amazing and really help all of us think about how we're going to do much more place-based work in the U.S. Then there’s the national coalition-building around things like coaching. We’re not all focused on doing the exact same work. But we're all focused on the same goals, and that's important.
Tom: What contributions by Nike over the years are you most proud of?
Caitlin: Inside of Project Play, (the website) How to Coach Kids is one I'm absolutely really proud of. It was recognition that coaches are key so how do we get a tool in the hands of parents, that just-in-time, in-your-pocket tool? It also was our first foray into digital coaching tools and taught us a lot about how to build products for the end user. It’s still a highly relevant piece of work whether it's for NGBs (sport-specific National Governing Bodies) to change the mindset of coaches, or for parents who, even if they aren’t coaching their kids directly, can help them find a coach or understand the coaches who really do coach their kids. From How to Coach Kids, we also built tools for Europe like ICOACHKIDS and we've gone deeper on how we serve girls now through Coaching HER with the Tucker Center.
We just released our 2022 Nike Impact Report and you’ll see that one of our targets is specifically focused on girls, making sure that we have at least 50% girls in the programs that we fund. We also look at it from an intersectional lens, meaning which girls are playing the least. From an equity perspective, we've looked at it from a lens of product because we actually are a product-based company. We know that girls need sports bras, and in some cultures a sport hijab, to participate.
Our overall commitment to girls, and to kids in marginalized communities, is really important. That includes looking at trauma through a lens of coaching — we were a founding partner of the Center for Healing and Justice through Sport pre-pandemic. Little did we know that trauma would become a major part of the sport-youth discourse. They’re doing really incredible work, and we made a point of training all our Made to Play partners in that technique.
We've also done our work through the Nike Community Ambassador program, which is a big scale play for us in terms of how we invest in our retail employees to be local coaches. Our retail employees love sport, but how they feel connected to it is when they go back and coach in their communities. Often, they're coaching in community organizations where they grew up, so it's a full circle moment for them. To be a Nike Community Ambassador you have to be trained, and that work has absolutely been partly driven by Project Play.
Tom: What have you learned over the years about the challenges and opportunities of driving progress in this disjointed space?
Caitlin: A couple things. One is that sport is inherently local. I used to focus on making scaled change nationally. I think you really have to look at the city level, and then hopefully, city-to-city, there’s an opportunity to exchange best practices and learn. Part of what we’ll learn at the Project Play Summit is what have we learned working with parks districts in Chicago and L.A., and how are their experiences going to be different but still similar enough that other parks districts can replicate?
The second thing I would say is you have to play in the spaces that are uniquely best for you. Nike has the power to inspire consumers. It's part of why I think digital coaching tools are so powerful; it gives a call to action for consumers.
Tom: What do you think the role is of national sport organizations in supporting programs?
Caitlin: I think it’s to set policy with a lower case “p,” probably. Do they expect all coaches to get trained, and trained on what exactly? Probably the biggest role they can play is helping reinforce a framework.
Tom: If you could change one thing about the way that we, as adults, deliver sport to youth, what would it be?
Caitlin: Put the kid at the center. If you really want to reimagine sport to be an inclusive experience, we have to think about, well, how does it serve kids today? How do kids experience sport today versus what we experienced, and what we think they're experiencing? Kids live in the present. This idea of some sort of payoff in the future doesn’t really work. How do we think about making it fun for them now?
Tom: What do you hope we achieve in Colorado Springs next month?
Caitlin: I hope that everyone who attends the Summit leaves inspired to continue to be a change agent in this space. We're going to have some really incredible organizations sharing their work and sharing their how. One of the things I love about Project Play is that it’s been so actionable. There are frameworks you can follow, and recommendations. I hope people will listen to the speakers and just get inspired, but also think about what they actually can do and take home.
Learn more about Project Play 2024, our industry roundtable, and the 2023 Project Play Summit.