Sports for 5000 Colombian kids' dreams

We spent our days in January thinking about our goals for this, and the next five years. After meetings, discussions and  reflections, we want to share three big plans for 2023:

1. Creating new high performance teams: If we want to reduce the inequality gaps that jeoperdize the development of Tiempo de Juego's participants, we need to foster real opportunities. We believe that if we promote an integral education model based in sports, participants will have more skills and abilities to make decisions about their future. 

2. Exploring Sport for environment protection: We want to keep doing a relevant and coherent work, to address solutions to the world's biggest issues. That is why we are currently working on a guide to create sport sessions for environmental awareness. 

3. Boost local initiatives: After several years of working with different communities, we want to support and boost local entrepeneurs. If we work as a network in the communities where we carry out our activities, we will promote systemic changes. 

Thanks to your generosity, we are making all of our big plans happen! 

We´re close to our goal: we currently work with 3,100 children in Colombia

Our offer of activities is aimed mainly at girls, boys and young people between 6 and 18 years old. These participants live in vulnerable communities, and face different risk factors associated with drugs use and trafficking, teenage pregnancy, involvement in gangs or groups outside the law on a daily basis.

Free Time Activities (sports, art, technology and communications) are the central axis of Tiempo de Juego, as they bring together thousands of boys, girls and young people around the game, creating physically and emotionally safe spaces for their development. We believe that the activities offered by the foundation help to marginalize children and young people from situations of risk, allowing them to dream and build positive life projects.

During july and august we partnered with mastercard in the framework of the Women´s Soccer America Cup to promote inclusion.

Sixteen years ago, Andrés Wiesner arrived in Cazucá seeking to portray the reality of the Los Gatos gang. In his journalistic work, he learned about the reality of thousands of boys and girls who, living in the midst of informal settlements and in conditions of profound vulnerability, faced risky situations associated with gangs, the sale and consumption of drugs, or teenage pregnancy.

Andrés decided to go beyond his journalistic work; from football, he sealed a social commitment that today translates into the work of  Tiempo de Juego, which began as a dream in Cazucá - the no man's land - as the media called it.

During the first years of work, Andrés relied on the support of friends to give workshops, make refreshments, and obtain donations. It didn't take long to find local leaders who shared his dream of transforming their neighborhood with soccer.

The game, which started with ten children, quickly multiplied the number of participants. The local leaders became the main responsible and custodians of the sports activities for the community, becoming safe spaces for meeting, fun and freedom. Within a few years, the activities began to diversify into athletics, basketball, dance, music, art, and even journalism. These disciplines, all of them crossed by a spirit of play and fun, became just one more reason to stimulate youth gathering, and by that way -we would see later-, to boost the empowerment and leadership of young people in the community.

Today, sixteen years after, we are part of national and international networks for organizations that also use sports as a means to promote peace and coexistance, and in April 6th we celebrate the International Sports for Development day. We invite you to learn about our programs and how sports have changed more than 5000 lives. 

Links:

• Get to know our work and get involved!

Fifteen years ago, Andrés Wiesner, a young journalist, arrived in Cazuca to create a media report about gang dynamics in this neighborhood. During this labor, he decided to play a football match with a group of kids. Suddenly, he realized that many of the social problems he identified in the neighborhood, especially those involving children, could be explained by the amount of time that boys, girls, and teenagers spent in the streets without positively occupying their time. Therefore, he started playing weekly football matches with these children, and the ball started rolling around Cazuca, inviting hundreds of children to the game.

Fifteen years later, we are very proud to announce that we are going to found Cazuca's first high-performance feminine football team. We know that girls and women struggle when accessing sports and recreation services. There are many visible and invisible barriers for them to play football at a competitive level. Hence, our goal is to provide high-quality and integral service for 25 girls and create positive role models for Colombian girls who want to pursue a sport-related life project. We know it is an ambitious and challenging project, but we also believe that we will keep rolling the ball and creating inclusive environments with the support of people like you. We´ll keep you updated!

We are back in the field! 

It has been a year since we had to close our presence-based activities. One year, we had to adapt all of our programs while also trying to meet our communities’ basic needs. We put all of our efforts into transforming our educational approach, and we were able to keep running our programs through radio, booklets, online lessons, among other things. 

Nevertheless, we strongly believe in the power of peer education and that interaction between children, youth can promote important spontaneous lessons. Thus, we decided to return to our football courts, classrooms, and parks using biosafety protocols and complementing these educational spaces with the tools we created in 2020. 

Special thanks to all of our supporters on this pandemic year; you are making it possible that more than 3000 children and young people continue to participate in their favorite activities!