Play Coll3ctive launches the Community of Practice

Kicking off a three-year learning journey connecting leaders from participating organisations across Canada, Mexico and the United States.

When the final whistle blows on a major sporting event, attention inevitably moves on. But in the communities that hosted it, the work continues. 

Across Canada, Mexico and the United States, local organizations are creating opportunities for young people through sport every day. They understand their communities, build trusted relationships and create spaces where young people can participate, belong and thrive. 

This is the foundation of Play Coll3ctive, a three-year initiative from the adidas Foundation, in partnership with Beyond Sport and Common Goal, bringing together 21 community organizations across the 16 host cities of the 2026 World Cup. 

Alongside multi-year funding, provided by the adidas Foundation, Play Coll3ctive is investing in something equally important: the people and organizational capacity behind the work. 

On September 3, Play Coll3ctive launched the Community of Practice, kicking off a three-year learning journey connecting one leader from each participating organization across Canada, Mexico and the United States. 

Canadian national team captain Jessie Fleming joined the first gathering, helping open a conversation around personal legacy and what it means for leaders and community organizations to build something that lasts beyond a major sporting moment. 

What is a Community of Practice? 

A Community of Practice is built on three principles of play: 

1. Identity: People want to be connected, valued, and supported by others 

2. Confidence: Leaders want to be confident in sharing, learning, and exchanging ideas 

3. Shared Opportunities: Leaders can exchange and grow together to address and create solutions for unique and collective challenges they face.  

   
   

Rather than bringing organizations together simply to receive training, a Community of Practice creates the conditions for people to learn with and from each other, sharing what is working, being open about what is difficult, exchanging knowledge across different contexts and building solutions together. 

For Play Coll3ctive, that means connecting leaders who may work thousands of kilometers apart but are building many of the same organizational capacities, ensuring young people and their communities remain the legacy of this World Cup cycle. This includes individually and collectively assessing where they’d like to grow, how they can share their practices, and defining their own learning objectives that become the basis of this community to grow.   

The ambition is not to prescribe one way of working. Each organization brings its own expertise, community and context. The opportunity is to create a space where that diversity becomes a source of learning. 

A three-year journey built around shared learning 

Common Goal, in partnership with the wider Play Coll3ctive team, is leading the co-design and facilitation of the Community of Practice as an embedded three-year learning journey. 

The Community of Practice will support leaders from 21 participating organisations, while creating opportunities for learning to extend into their organizations. The aim is to strengthen both individual leadership and the knowledge, practices and organizational capacity that can contribute to lasting impact in their communities. 

Over the three years, leaders will learn from one another’s experiences, challenges and innovations through intercultural exchange, peer learning and practical capacity-building. 

The journey will explore areas including safeguarding, safe places to play, coach education, governance, partnerships and collaboration, and monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL). 

Importantly, this is not designed as a fixed training curriculum delivered to organizations. The Community of Practice is being shaped with its members. The first year, for example, reflects priorities identified through both an initial needs assessment and organizational assessment. Year on year this will continue to evolve based on the needs and priorities the participating leaders identify together. 

Learning will also take different forms. Collective workshops will bring the full community together to “train” together with a “visiting coach”, while smaller peer groups, one-to-one conversations and sessions with visiting experts will create opportunities to go deeper around particular organizational needs. 

Throughout the first year, leaders will move between reflection, peer exchange and practical application — exploring questions around organizational development, youth voice and safeguarding, as well as how organizations communicate and measure their impact. The intention is for learning not to stay within the Community of Practice, but to travel back into participating organizations and inform their work with their peers and young people. 

Ultimately, the Community of Practice is about creating the relationships, knowledge and shared learning infrastructure that continues to build on the strengths of these organizations long after the tournament itself has ended. 

Kicking off the Community of Practice 

The Community spent the summer forming the team, warming up and learning our style of play. On September 3, we officially kicked off our first half, bringing together leaders from across the Play Coll3ctive network to begin their three-year journey. 

Joined by Canadian national team captain Jessie Fleming, the session explored personal and collective legacy and created the first opportunities for leaders to connect across cities, countries and contexts. 

“The greatest gift soccer has given me is getting to meet people from different cultures. There is so much we can learn from each other,” Jessie shared — an idea that speaks directly to the ambition of the Community of Practice. 

She also reflected on what she hopes the game can hold onto as it grows: “My wish for the sport and especially for young people is to preserve the joy that we feel in the game.” 

Participants also began shaping how they want to work together as a community, establishing the foundations for the trust, openness and peer learning that will underpin the journey ahead. Across the group, words including belonging, connection, empathy, listening, agency, collaboration, curiosity and joy emerged — alongside the importance of showing up for one another.

The session marked the starting point rather than the destination. Over the next three years, the relationships and learning created through the Community of Practice will continue to evolve alongside the leaders and organizations themselves — helping ensure that the legacy of the World Cup is also built by the people and communities who remain when the spotlight moves on.