Translator: Iris Klotz Reviewer: Denise RQ
Hello, good evening everybody.
I am here to share an experience I have been living for several years now.
But fundamentally, I want to tell you my dream
and share it with you.
It is a dream that takes place in a yard, using a ball.
I am here to tell you about
community development soccer initiative.
It occurs to me that you might ask yourself two questions.
First, what is a woman doing talking about soccer?
We'll leave that question aside for now:
let's see if we'll be able to answer it at the end.
The second question that I imagine comes to your mind is:
what does community development have to do with soccer?
which seems like a logical question to me, mainly because, when talking about soccer,
or when talking about the experience of playing with your friends,
most of us experience soccer as spectators.
Right? Tournaments that we watch on TV,
championship games, which team is winning,
Who is going to win the trophy this year?
The million-dollar games- that's a lot, right?
These happen in what we call, from our perspective,
"professional soccer"; but imagine a totally different context.
Our project takes place in Moreno,
right here, about 40 km away from Buenos Aires.
It is a socially marginalized area.
I am not going into detail about what that means.
What is social exclusion?
Imagine a blurry black
and white picture, that is exclusion.
There is no definition, no color, no life.
Social exclusion
challenges us to find tools,
and strategies we can use to build
a project for the people of Moreno,
whose most disadvantaged group
is the young people, right?
The "double don'ts, who don't study or work.
Those who think,
well... some polls say
that 40% of the youth between the age of 18 and 25,
think they'll be dead or gone within the next five years.
That is the context of their lives.
And in the search to find meaning, we find soccer.
For us, soccer is, at its core, our opportunity.
Any social organization, government program that goes to a neighborhood,
like any neighborhood where we work and says it wants to work
on youth problems,
well, they go create training courses, micro credit programs,
job skills training,
and we are absolutely sure- because we have tried it ourselves-
they're never going to have the same appeal that we have with a ball.
This is not a judgment of the usefulness of those strategies, OK?
That training, those initiatives are useful,
in fact, they are necessary: they create social change.
But they do not speak to the youth.
Soccer speaks to the youth.
The story does not end there, that would be too easy.
In order to generate change, social development through soccer,
we have to create an educational process.
This educational process
does not mean we are "dropping the kid off at school"
and hoping something happens.
It's a guided process, a process that requires certain values
and certain social factors that cement the proposal.
These values: in soccer we talk a lot about "fair play", right?,
To us, "fair play" is a value but from our work perspective
it is not just about respecting the rules,
like not kicking your opponent, etc, etc.
But for us, it's about creating a space for coexistence,
establishing a context where you can create trust in order to work.
For us, fair play means
looking each other in the eye, seeing ourselves in the other,
realizing that we have a lot in common,
that we share an urgency,
a necessity, that carries us forward with this project.
The activists that embody these initiatives
are the same people that are key figures in this community
and for us that was an experience with a proven track record.
We started working there in '94
at a garbage dump where a group of boys,
those boys on the corner,
had started to play with a ball as a way of interacting with each other,
as a way to inhabit the space
and they chose that garbage dump as the symbol of a dream.
And a day after winning a championship,
they came back and put up a sign that said
"Sports center coming soon".
Today, 14 years later, that sports center is there. It exists.
It's a very beautiful building
and it's called "Club Defensores Del Chaco de Moreno",
I hope a few of you recognize it
It's a beautiful experience.
Those same young people in the community
who were able to kick-start the change,
not only a change in the community,
but also a change in their own lives
also drew us into this change that
we had been supporting
fundamentally as community advocates.
We believe that there's potential there
and that it's possible to do things and change things.
And analyzing it, well
How are we going to keep this moving forward?
We saw that the field, as a symbol,
continues to be one of the fundamental
anchors of the neighborhood,
in the poorest neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city.
The few institutions that are still running there are: schools, of course,
the church, emergency medical assistance when they exist,
and the neighborhood soccer club.
The neighborhood soccer club is what brings boy and girls together,
all the young people, the old soccer players in the neighborhood
who remember when they put up the first goals
and brought the championships here.
It brings mothers and fathers together,
and they talk about how precarious all of this is
because a lot of the time these clubs, these institutions,
aren't more than two goals and some empty space.
Nevertheless it has potential, doesn't it?
A potential community exists
that can mobilize itself for a passion,
what represents the neighborhood colors for them,
the colors of the club jersey.
In this sense, our job
is creating these types of social organization,
always keeping the focus, the target,
let's say the central question
is the organization.
Of course there are a ton of strategies
for going forward, right?
Like I said earlier:
the field is always a school without walls,
but hey, we have to build it, right?
We have to build that school,
that process,
and via different educational strategies
education is always cross-linked
with sports.
Soccer every weekend lets us play.
We say that during the week,
the weekend game lets us
put a lot of situations on the table
that there will already be some kind of disagreement,
there'll already be some complication
that lets us put ourselves back into
this need to build, to construct networks,
solidarity networks,
to build this sense that,
"if we don't raise each other up
all together, this is very difficult"
Through this trajectory that we were building with all of them,
in these soccer clubs that I'm telling you about,
fundamentally the people that take part
do so on a completely voluntary basis.
The father that comes on his bicycle straight from work at 7pm,
he comes to see the boys in the neighborhood and coach them.
With all of this good will, what do we do?
Well, we channel the energy,
we give them tools that help them understand.
Understand the role that they play in society,
understand how they're fulfilling that role
simply through what seems like
a silly little ball game, right?
We also like to frame our work
as a proposal for cultural change.
This proposal for cultural change, fundamentally,
what it seeks to accomplish is, it begins to set the stage
with these things that are ordinary, right?
Like, well.. in Moreno for example,
there's only one hospital for half a million residents.
For a boy to have a checkup with a doctor
to see if he's in good physical condition to play soccer
Is an almost impossible thing. But now we ask: is that right?
Is that normal? No. Of course it's not.
So with that cultural change in mind,
what we want to do
is eradicate these ingrained feelings
that normalize this lack of access, this situation of social exclusion.
There are obviously other challenges
for this cultural change: tearing down certain myths,
certain stereotypes, like for example
that women don't play soccer,
that women don't understand, as if that meant
that women didn't have anything to offer to this space.
We work with so many women,
so many mothers that go to the soccer club, that lead it,
that do the accounts,
that coach the boys,
that play soccer,
many of these women play soccer too.
There are so many other myths.
Another myth that
we really have to debunk very strongly
has to do with alcohol.
The idea that, "I finish the match and then I drink a beer", right?
This association between alcohol and a recreational activity.
What is that? Alcohol consumption.
Alcohol is a scourge of these neighborhoods.
and the truth is that one beer after a match
turns into lots of beers, a lot of times at these soccer matches,
which started as parties, turn into brawls.
So we tell them that,
our idea to generate tools so that they understand their role,
to learn to manage their activities better.
So that they understand and recognize their potential
in what we call "the construction of dignity".
Fundamentally dignity is collective.
Dignity is not an individual act,
it's a collective act and it's a fundamentally political act.
And the question that you might be asking,
"what is this girl doing talking about soccer?"
I don't come from a big soccer family,
I grew up in a village in Patagonia where the wind and the cold
make it almost impossible to play any kind of sport.
I don't come from a soccer family;
my dad didn't play soccer;
my brothers, who I know
must be watching this, don't play much.
My father was born in the Philippines, he's an immigrant
He was a Filipino immigrant that never,
never once in his life played ball, I'm sure of that
But what he was able to give me was the idea
that the capacity to be outraged by injustice
is a virtue
because it kick-starts action.
And in this sense what happens to us in the neighborhoods
with the people that we work with
and that we learn with every day
this capacity for outrage against injustice
is a virtue.
It's a virtue that moves us forward
and I want to appeal to.. well I just love this photo
up there, that we wanted to show you
is this, how the role that the women are taking on in these institutions
in this case building health programs,
training programs, assistance programs,
fundamental things, yes?
Access to basic health information is so necessary.
I wanted to remind you of that, related to this idea of
the power of soccer.
Everyone in this room, I imagine,
or 99% of the people present here,
has seen, either live or recorded,
a thousand times on YouTube,
Maradona's famous goal against the English.
That goal, when you see how beautiful it is,
you get emotional, and when besides
it's accompanied by Victor Morales yelling
"Cosmic Kite, which planet did you come from?”
These metaphors, the emotion that they generate,
in the moment, and every time we revisit them,
we feel better.
Because that game wasn't just won by Maradona,
it wasn't just won by the Argentinian team,
we won it, the Argentinian people.
We won that world cup.
That feeling, that emotion;
it's the same one that we feel on the weekends on the soccer field.
A boy that goes to play there, he's doomed, isn't he?
That boy goes and scores a goal and unleashes joy:
joy for his teammates, joy for his parents-
his parents feel better because their boy made a goal
and his coach feels better because the goal that boy made
and the people in the soccer club, the people who participate
they feel better, too.
And the neighborhood feels better, thanks to that emotion.
So for us the power of soccer has to do with
the power of transmission; transmitting joy,
transmitting passion, transmitting emotion-
this is a powerful, transformational emotion.
Without joy, without passion, it's very difficult.
And for us, the game
that we're playing
is a difficult game.
The goal is very difficult to reach:
this is the struggle against indifference.
and like all games that must
be fought to the end
and what I hope will be a game well won,
it requires courage,
it requires commitment,
but fundamentally:
showing up.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)