On 20 July, International Chess Day and the anniversary of FIDE’s founding in Paris in 1924, the FIDE Social Commission marked the occasion with Chess as Social Value, an online panel discussion bringing together the people behind FIDE’s flagship social projects. Moderated by André Vögtlin, Chair of the FIDE Social Commission, the one-hour session gathered voices from prisons, refugee camps, classrooms and community programmes across four continents around a single question: what is the real magic of social chess?
FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich opened the discussion with congratulations on International Chess Day, celebrated across the world from the United Nations headquarters to member federations. He reflected on how FIDE has acquired a second mission alongside competitive chess. While social initiatives have existed throughout FIDE’s history, the last three years have brought a clear focus on bringing chess to communities that elite competition rarely reaches, from children on the autism spectrum to refugee camps, prisons and the elderly. “The people who do it are the highest value that we have, whether it is teachers, instructors, or just volunteers and enthusiasts that are helping,” he said.
The moments that changed everything
Asked for the moment they truly understood that social chess makes a difference, the panelists answered with personal stories rather than statistics.
For Dana Reizniece, Deputy Chair of the FIDE Management Board, the idea began when she first joined FIDE and considered what she could contribute to an already established
international organisation. Her answer was social chess: making FIDE more human and accessible, while expanding the game beyond the boundaries of elite sport. “I was so happy to see so many like-minded people, both in FIDE and outside of it, that were ready to jump on it and develop so many beautiful projects that we can celebrate today,” she said.
Mikhail Korenman, leader of the Chess for Freedom project, identified several defining moments. One was the story of Hector, a man in Chicago who used chess while serving a prison sentence and went on to build a successful life after his release. The most emotional came during a visit to Mongolia this January, where Korenman met five women who had been released from prison in connection with their participation in the chess programme, all five now in employment. “They were full of life, and that is, I believe, the direct result of our program,” he said.
Lāsma Kokoreviča, formerly Secretary of the Social Commission and now working within the Latvian prison administration, saw the change not only amongst prisoners, but also amongst the correctional staff around them. “The moment came when I saw my colleagues on the ground turn from sceptics into real supporters and true believers,” she said. “They began rooting for our teams. That was when I realised that chess has this power.”
Anastasia Sorokina, leader of the FIDE Chess for Protection project, traced the Infinite Chess project from its origins to its adoption as a FIDE project in 2021, remembering a girl on the autism spectrum who, after half a year in the programme, began smiling and naming the pieces.
She also spoke about her own experience of displacement in 2022, and how the chess community became a source of what she called social security as well as social chess. “Through social chess, we give hope and we give support to people who are in a difficult situation,” she said.
She also spoke about her own experience of displacement in 2022, and how the chess community became a source of what she called social security as well as social chess. “Through social chess, we give hope and we give support to people who are in a difficult situation,” she said.
Anastasiya Karlovich, who runs the girls’ clubs in the Kakuma and Kalobeyei refugee camps in Kenya alongside Salome Melia, described the Saturday lessons the pair deliver by video call to four schools of girls, a project now in its fourth year that teaches life skills and a sense of belonging alongside the game itself. “Chess is an international language, and those who started to play immediately felt different and welcomed in our chess community,” she said.
Susan Namangale, Global Director of The Gift of Chess, pointed to the first Chess for Freedom conference in Chicago as the moment the scale of the movement became clear to her, the beginning of connections that have since carried chess sets into communities across Africa. “A single chess set can change a life,” she said. She also recalled a former inmate from Malawi who travelled to India to speak at a Chess for Freedom event, a story that made national news and deepened the Malawi Prison Service’s engagement with the programme.
Antonio Porter, Director of Programs at the Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago, pointed to Checkmate for Kids, an event where participants in custody teach their own children to play. “Seeing that happen was the moment for me, and why we continue to have chess expand across our jail,” he said.
How do you explain the social value of chess to someone who has no interest in the game?
Vögtlin next asked how the value of social chess could be communicated to people outside the chess world, including governments, institutions and potential partners.
Reizniece began by rejecting the idea that social chess is an optional extra. “Some would say that social chess is a cherry on the top of the cake,” she said. “But over these years, it has grown into something much more. I think it is the most delicious part of the birthday cake of FIDE.”
Citing figures from the United Nations, UNESCO and the World Bank, she noted that more than 120 million people are currently forcibly displaced by conflict and persecution, more than 250 million children and young people remain out of school, and nearly 700 million people still live in extreme poverty. International sports organisations, she argued, are amongst those with an obligation to care for global welfare, precisely because of their global reach. Chess is affordable, scalable and crosses languages, and it has become an instrument for building partnerships with governments, ministries, universities and civil society that professional chess alone could never create. Today chess is played in prisons in more than 60 countries, and the Infinite Chess project reaches children with autism spectrum disorder in 28 countries.
“Sometimes people ask us whether chess can really change society, and I think it is the wrong question. The better question is, how many lives can we change?” she said, adding that “perhaps most importantly, it teaches people that every position can improve if you keep thinking, keep learning, and keep believing there is another move.”
Prabitha Urwyler, board member of the Swiss Chess Federation and newly elected to the European Chess Union board, emphasised the importance of beginning with a personal story. Her own involvement started as a chess mother, when she saw her socially shy autistic child find an identity and a world of his own through the game. “A board is not just a board,” she said. “It can be a safe space.” Chess can provide structure without pressure. It allows people to pause, think, decide and develop confidence in their choices. Drawing on the Chess for Hope projects in Burkina Faso and Kosovo, she added: “Chess can change lives, not because every person becomes a champion, but because everyone can get a chance to make a meaningful move.”
Personal stories create an emotional connection, Urwyler said, but they must be accompanied by evidence. To secure long-term support, social chess must show that its impact is real, measurable and relevant not only to players, but to society as a whole.
What has chess achieved that other tools could not?
The discussion then turned to the qualities that make chess particularly effective in social settings. Porter said one of the clearest benefits inside correctional facilities is the way chess transforms otherwise unstructured time. “There is idle time for individuals in custody to sit and do nothing,” he said. “One of the biggest things we see through chess is the impact on their critical thinking and their yearning for more knowledge.”
Participation has encouraged some to seek other opportunities. “After participating in chess, they want to expand into the other programmes we offer, including higher education and yoga,” he said. “Upon release, we hope that they will continue teaching their children chess and bettering their lives altogether.”
Kokoreviča answered from the prison side, paying tribute to volunteer Sergei who travelled more than an hour by train every week, unpaid, to run sessions. “After several weeks, they realised that nobody was paying him to be there. He simply came because he believed that they were worth his time, and that changed everything,” she said. His dedication, she added, “built the kind of trust that no budget or formal programme can create on its own.”
When does a chess project become genuinely life-changing?
A question from an audience member in Jordan returned the panel to the distinction between an inspiring story and lasting change.
Sorokina said the habits developed through chess can affect the decisions people make away from the board. “Chess teaches you to make a decision, calculate that decision and think ahead,” she said. “Social chess gives people an opportunity to think more carefully about their steps.”
Vögtlin then shared an example from his own family and the role chess can play for older people. After his mother moved into a care home, she became increasingly negative. He arranged for her to play online chess on a tablet. “Since then, she has played more than 9,000 short games,” he said. “You cannot imagine what this change meant. She is positive and interested again. We see stories like this every day in our social initiatives. Sometimes the impact is astonishing.”
The next bold step
Looking forward, Namangale called for deeper collaboration and engagement at government level, pointing to Malawi’s national development agenda, Malawi 2063, where she has argued for chess as a tool for mindset change. “We can achieve more together. By now, we all know that chess is more than a game,” she said.
Urwyler argued that passion is not what the movement lacks. The next bold step, she suggested, is to move from individual pilot projects to a shared global infrastructure: facilitator training, ethical guidelines, safeguarding principles, simple monitoring tools and university partnerships, in a framework serious enough for funders yet simple enough for communities to use. “Every person deserves a safe space to think and to be empowered,” she said. “Sometimes this space is just the 64 squares.”
The discussion closed with a common message running through projects in very different parts of the world. The effect of social chess does not come from the board alone, but from the people who use it to create trust, structure, friendship, confidence and belonging. As Reizniece put it: “Social impact does not begin with funding. It begins with someone who cares enough to make the first move.”
The full recording of the discussion is available on the FIDE Social Commission YouTube channel.