Franz Gastler

Co-founder

Co-founder of Yuwa

Photo: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA)

Franz Gastler is the co-founder of Yuwa (2009)[1], an Indian non-profit working on sports, women & children and education from Ranchi.

Franz Gastler (born 1982) is an American social activist and football coach who co-founded Yuwa, a non-governmental organisation in Jharkhand, India, that uses girls' team sport and schooling as a route out of child marriage, illiteracy and trafficking. He founded the organisation in 2009 and has served as its executive and administrative director.

Yuwa began with a single girls' football team and grew into one of the largest girls' football programmes in India, with hundreds of players training daily in villages around Ormanjhi, near Ranchi, and the great majority of teams coached by young women who came up through the programme.

Early life and education

Gastler was born in 1982 and grew up in Edina, Minnesota, graduating from Edina High School in 2000. He took a BA and MA in international political economy through the University Professors Program at Boston University and holds certificates in negotiation and mediation from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Before moving to India he worked as a ski and snowboard instructor, interned at Colombia's ministry of finance in Bogota, and trained in judo at the United States Olympic Training Center.

Career

Gastler moved to India in 2008. After working as a consultant with the Confederation of Indian Industry in Delhi he joined Krishi Gram Vikas Kendra, a Jharkhand non-governmental organisation, teaching English and living in a village in the Ormanjhi area. A request from one of his pupils to be taught football led him to start a girls' team.

Yuwa, whose name means 'youth' in Hindi, was founded in 2009 with financial support from three of Gastler's school friends, Greg Deming, Stephen Peterson and Erik Odland. It combined football with academic support, initially funding scholarships to private schools and running early-morning tuition in English and mathematics. The programme grew to dozens of teams and several hundred players across villages around Ranchi, with about fifty female coaches trained through it, and later added an Ultimate Frisbee programme.

Yuwa teams travelled abroad to the Donosti Cup in Spain in 2013, 2016 and 2018. In April 2015 Rose Thomson, who joined Yuwa in 2012 on a Walker Fellowship from Hendrix College and later married Gastler, founded Yuwa School, which opened with 45 pupils and prepares girls for university admission; several graduates have won scholarships to universities abroad.

Gastler has spoken about Yuwa at TEDx events, on some occasions together with Yuwa players such as team captain Rinky Kumari.

Recognition

Gastler received the Nike Gamechangers Award in 2011, was named among Yahoo! India's Unsung Heroes in 2012, received the NDTV Spirit of Sports Award in 2012 and the Times Now 'Indian at Heart' award in 2013. In 2019 Yuwa received the Laureus Sport for Good Award.[2][3][4][5][6]

Yuwa

Yuwa uses football and schooling to change the odds for girls in rural Jharkhand, where early marriage and trafficking cut short many girls' education. Founded in 2009 by Franz Gastler, it runs a girls' football programme alongside its own school, using the discipline and confidence of team sport to keep girls enrolled in education and open up paths to further study.

Yuwa reports the following, on its own site: