This post originally appeared on Video Volunteers, an award-winning international community media organization based in India. An edited version is published below as part of a content-sharing agreement. Poonam is a teenager from Varanasi, a city in the Uttar Pradesh State of North India. She used to believe firmly that girls should stay at home and eventually get married. “Today, I feel that girls should have full freedom,” she says. What changed for Poonam? In a word: sports. She and a bunch of girls in her community learned to play ball.

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