{"id":120,"date":"2009-06-25T08:42:10","date_gmt":"2009-06-25T08:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spiritoffootball.com\/2010\/blog\/?p=45"},"modified":"2009-06-25T08:42:10","modified_gmt":"2009-06-25T08:42:10","slug":"the-power-of-involvement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2010\/blog\/2009\/06\/25\/the-power-of-involvement\/","title":{"rendered":"The power of involvement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Special Olympics just posted a story<\/a> on their website, the main gist of which I’ve quoted here:<\/p>\n

I had resigned myself to the fact that my son would never prosper in anything but seeing him participating in the young athlete activities I realised that he had a talent in sports and now I have hope that my son will prosper in something; sports. The happiness I saw in my son’s face on that day cannot be equalled to anything, by the time we were going back home all he wanted to acquire was a ball, he kept on asking me if I will by him a ball on our way home.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This had me on the verge of tears this morning — not tears of sadness, but of joy and anticipation. If this is a foretaste of what’s to come on The Ball’s journey to South Africa, then I can’t wait to get going. I’m really looking forward to the many ways in which The Ball can contribute to the great work that Special Olympics are doing.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, if you want to contribute towards this boy’s dream of acquiring a ball (or at least acquiring access<\/em> to one, which is in many ways more important than ownership) then please visit our JustGiving page<\/a> and make a donation to Alive & Kicking, who will deliver footballs to our partners (including Special Olympics projects) in Africa. Or, if you prefer, you can go to Special Olympics’ donations page<\/a> and support them directly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Special Olympics just posted a story on their website, the main gist of which I’ve quoted here: I had resigned myself to the fact that my son would never prosper in anything but seeing him participating in the young athlete activities I realised that he had a talent in sports and now I have hope […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-ball"],"geo":null,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theball.tv\/2010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}