Empower Youth Through Soccer in Recife, Brazil

Dear love.fútbol friend,

We’ve been making major strides down here in Recife and we thought we’d send you an update. We’ve added several great partners and new groups of supporters, and we’ve found many, many more communities in need of our work.

Love.futbol recently partnered with Brazilian first-division soccer club Nautico to introduce our work to their fans and supporters. Nautico featured the love.fútbol logo on their shirts during a league game against their crosstown rivals Sport Recife and placed banners in the stadium. The game was televised nationally on Brazilian television and generated scores of interviews and media appearances. With love.futbol’s outreach to professional soccer teams, word is spreading and we are gaining recognition throughout many parts of Brazil.

Also, love.futbol has teamed up with GUERREIRASPROJECT, a female-empowerment initiative that brings female soccer players into impoverished communities to serve as positive role models for young girls. The partnership represents an innovative approach to gender and ‘sport for development’ through which safe football spaces, professional female players, and local communities are brought together to inspire and motivate girls. Love.futbol’s community-driven approach creates the physical and psychological football space as a platform for future development. The GUERREIRASPROJECT builds the capacity of professional female players to serve as role models and ambassadors of the game in the community; and a 10-week local campaign titled ‘Não Se Pode Ser o Que Não Se Pode Ver’ (You Can’t be What You Can’t See) is used to launch the gender-sensitive space. This space serves as a community platform for increasing the visibility of female role models, allowing their voices to be heard, and enabling new voices and bodies to participate in the nation’s most popular game. Ultimately, the project uses football as a tool for challenging narrow gender norms that have restricted girls’ and women’s involvement in the game, while simultaneously promoting individual and community empowerment.  As, the GUERREIRASPROJECT visits communities, it is identifying the communities that love.futbol will target in the near future.  

We're excited about everything we’ve been able to accomplish with your support thus far! We’re gaining momentum and are hoping to reach more and more kids as we gather steam. Please stay in touch and continue to support us! Spread the word among your friends and family and urge them to support us with a donation or with their time!

Thanks for being part of the love.fútbol family,

The love.fútbol team

Links:

• love.futbol featured on Brazilian national TV!

Dear love.fútbol friend,

Bom dia from Brazil!

It’s been a few months since our last update, so we wanted to reach out and bring you up to speed. We’ve got a lot of great news to share!

First, our project has gotten great publicity down here. We got a great write-up in the Jornal do Commercio in January and periodic shout-outs in the popular soccer blog “Blog do Torcedor” here in Brazil. The press has been great, especially for establishing credibility in a new country where fewer people are familiar with our work.

We’ve also established strategic partnerships that will be helpful in the medium term. SECOPA, the Special Secretariat for the 2014 Brazil World Cup here in the state of Pernambuco, is assisting us in securing land, finding partner communities, fast-tracking bureaucratic processes and obtaining funding. We’re also finalizing a sponsorship contract with Salinas Resorts, which should secure significant operational funding over the next few months.

In terms of organizational growth, we’ve fully trained our first LF Brasil Representative, Flavinho Lira (pictured below). Flavinho will be directly responsible for seeking communities of need, evaluating them against our program criteria and implementing our community-driven methodology. We’ve also added former US Soccer Federation CEO Hank Steinbrecher and influential US World Cup ‘94 figure Farrukh Quraishi to the love.fútbol board of directors. Their influence and experience will help us increase our program effectiveness and grow sustainably, not only in Brazil, but hopefully in new countries as well.

Additionally, we’re working to establish ongoing programs on our platforms. Believe it or not, the Soccer for Development (S4D) sector is young here in northeast Brazil, but we hope to play a strong role in its growth.

In our last update, we wrote to you about Maruin, the community where children have to wade through a trash-filled swamp in order to find a safe place to play. We’re working on procuring land for the project - finding a suitable site in Maruin has been a real challenge.

Luckily, we’ve been evaluating other communities in parallel, visiting favelas and areas of great need. We’ve reached the approval phase in Cachoeira, a small village in Alagoas. Cachoeira’s kids share one field with three other communities and close to one thousand children compete with adults for access to the game. There is no dedicated place for children to play.

We’ll likely start construction in Cachoeira within the next three weeks. Community involvement has been very strong. Leading the charge has been Professora Betania, pictured below. With her help, we’ve collected signatures from over 100 community volunteers!

We’re excited for what lies ahead for LF Brazil. The country is booming and while deep social ills remain, attitudes towards social equity are improving along with the economy. Everyone is excited for the World Cup in 2014, an opportunity that will enable us to bring safe soccer to more and more children.

Thanks again for your support. We couldn’t do this without you!

Best,
The love.fútbol team

Links:

• Find out more on our website
• love.futbol featured in the Jornal do Commercio
• love.futbol featured in Blog do Torcedor