Jorge Casimiro, who is president of the Nike Foundation and vice president of the Nike Global Community, arrived in Monaco to participate in the 10th Peace and Sport Forum as a speaker. Jorge focused on Nike’s initiative “Made to Play”, which aims to stimulate active development. It is he who brings attention to the fact that active children are more successful in school and in life, in general. In the past, Jorge was responsible for PR and communications at Coca-Cola.
In 2016, he was noted as one of “40 under 40 Latinos in sports” according to the Huffington Post. Today Jorge lives in Portland, Oregon. HelloMonaco spoke to Casimiro within the framework of the Peace and Sport Forum.
HelloMonaco: Do you think it’s important and easy to engage younger generations in sports activities?
Jorge Casimiro: Today’s generations of kids are the least active in history and that’s why it’s important to engage them in sports, physical activities and to play. If we think about it, kids are actually made to play, they love to move. What’s important is that we give them an opportunity to do that when they are young. That’s the age when they fall in love with sport, where they have fun and they take those habits with them, being active for life and all the benefits that come with that.
HM: What’s the mission of your foundation?
JC: The mission of what we do in Nike is to unleash human potential by moving the world, starting with kids. We can imagine a world where kids are much more active, they are playing and they are having fun. That’s what we want to do! We want to inspire them, give them support and let kids be kids.
HM: What are your actual projects?
JC: We focus our efforts on something that is called “Made to play” to make kids move. We do it all over the world, in different cities. We want to make sure that we are being relevant in the communities where we do those interventions. So everywhere around the world we go, typically to the cities, we make sure that we conduct inside research on kids, that we listen to what they are telling us, what their parents and teachers are telling us, in terms of why they are not moving. Afterwards, we work with non-profit organizations, different levels of government and schools, to make sure that we design those interventions for kids in the way that is most relevant. What we do in Chicago is going to be very different to what we do in Shanghai. We have many programs, which are focused on schools, as kids spend the most of their time there. Here, in Europe, we are building active schools, in Paris with Play International, in London with the Youth Sports Trust and now we have our new partnership with Discovery Education to reach teachers and to make sure that they have the tools they need to help kids get active in the class and to bring the same message to the parents.
