HARPER PERFORMANCE CIC is an SEUK certified non-profit social enterprise providing performance-support services and consultancy to aspirational athletes, teams and sports organisations across the world.
We exist to fiercely champion the underdog, specialising in the provision of relevant, accessible, sustainable and locally-driven performance support to athletes and organisations hamstrung by logistical, economic and sociocultural barriers to sporting excellence.
From our work at Harper Performance, we know that athletes from certain backgrounds and in certain geographical locations have a lack of access to the aforementioned material resources such as stadia and equipment, and to human resources such as coaches and science-based support systems. We know, having worked across the spectrum of have’s and have not’s in elite sports development that inequalities in ’system strength’ really do exist.
If these inequalities in 'system strength' are accepted as relevant to the fairness of competition, then clearly, competitors from weaker sport systems, from disadvantaged communities or from the developing world will have a disadvantage in developing elite performance from the very outset, perhaps throwing into the question the very validity of modern sports competition?
Passion and a sense of duty.
Harper Performance CIC exists to build capacity, not reliance; to complement, not takeover. Our approach to performance-support is to deliver sustainable consultancy to develop interventions that can flourish and self-sustain long after we’ve gone home.
Our approach is underpinned by the concept of ‘Kanju’.
Kanju is simply a ‘specific form of creativity born from African difficulty’. It is a rule breaking informal and super-agile ethos that makes it possible to just get things done in the face of contact obstacles, headaches, failing infrastructure, corruption and a dogmatic and bureaucratic banking system.
Kanju is a the very heart of our mission at Harper Performance CIC. As Dayo Olopade contends; “one of the biggest problems with the world’s longtime orientation toward [the developing world] is a preference for interactions between governments; or between gigantic formal institutions, when the most vibrant, authentic and economically significant interactions are between individuals and decentralised groups.
Our mission is not to transplant the high performance sport systems of Western Europe, Australia or the USA to the organisations we work with in the developing world. Instead we utilise the expertise of the small and agile HP Projects team to foster Kanji-Style free-form development in these disadvantage, deprived and marginalised athletic communities.
Ownership of the performance-support systems of those we work with remain in the locality with out team consulting to plug skills-gaps, provide expertise in the same way we would with a client in the developed world, and help facilitate the development of a locally-driven solution to develop sporting excellence.
