Re-engaging local youth for sustainable sport-for-development

Despite increasing evidence that sport-for-development (SFD) programs can contribute to community development, there remains a lack of empirical inquiry into different socio-managerial aspects of SFD. For example, in attempts to achieve locally sustained SFD programs, the roles, responsibilities and potential impact of re-engaged youth need further investigation. The authors define re-engaged youth as previous program participants who have maintained strong links with the organization and who return to the program at a later stage as volunteers or staff members. In this paper, the authors examine ways in which Re-engaged youth of the Blue Dragon Children Foundation's SFD program contribute to sustainable management and indirectly to community development within a disadvantaged community setting in Hanoi, Vietnam. Following an interpretive mode of inquiry, the authors conducted and analyzed two focus groups (six participants each) and 12 in-depth interviews with re-engaged youth (n = 7) and key program stakeholders (n = 5). Overall, re-engaged youth represented key drivers for organizational success; they served as program culture experts, role models, leaders and mentors, and creators of a family feel in SFD and beyond. The authors argue that re-engaged youth are demonstrating a number of important change agent capabilities that enable them to uniquely gauge and best respond to the needs of program participants and local communities in complex sociocultural environments. (C) 2018 Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.