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Read moreMangueira Favela
Background
Mangueira is a favela recognized throughout Brazil for creating and sharing a unique brand of samba that has fueled Rio’s spectacular Carnaval for nearly a century. This is a community full of life and with great, talented people. But it’s also a very rough place. Mangueira continues to be raided regularly by Rio’s elite Military Police units targeting the heavily armed and well-organized drug traffickers that completely control the neighborhood. As a result of these police invasions and risk for conflict with rival drug gangs, the community is known for its alarmingly high murder rates. Residents living in this densely packed neighborhood must live with an underlying fear of stray bullets harming their families and themselves.
To make matters worse, within this favela undereducated and underdeveloped children are the subject of constant recruitment by the dominant drug-trafficking gang which seeks out younger and younger members to work the front lines.
On the outside, the favela’s youth frequently are confronted with social exclusion and limited employment opportunities, making them all the more vulnerable to the lure of the drug trade. Our objective is to protect these children from recruitment, while providing them with critical developmental and organizational skills to improve their prospects for entering a challenging job market. Because of unique circumstances in Mangueira, soccer offers a great opportunity to achieve this goal.
Project
Developing Minds Foundation is sponsoring a sports academy for 200 children who live in Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished Mangueira favela (urban slum). As part of our project, former professional soccer players from Brazil’s major league coach the forgotten and poverty-stricken kids of Mangueira – helping to coordinate, train, guide, mentor and inspire them on soccer fields inside the favela.
Our project, sponsored by the professional soccer team Flamengo, is based on the notion that children living in conditions of poverty, unrest and violence will benefit from a structured environment where they can undergo healthy emotional development, learn leadership and team-oriented skills, and experience the positive influence of adults in their lives. Throughout, children absorb the idea that nothing is impossible.
From Mangueira’s shantytowns perched on a hillside in the center of Rio, residents can literally look down into Brazil’s great Maracanã soccer stadium -- one of the world’s largest -- where professional teams play most Sunday afternoons. Most of the kids are wildly passionate about the sport, to say the least, but few can ever hope to afford the price of entry to the exalted stadium. Not so quick to give up on their passion, these kids are thrilled to be part of a soccer project offered in their own favela. Awed by those running the project, including former athletes who played in Maracanã themselves, the kids of Mangueira become a captive audience to what the coaches have to teach.
Five days a week, our coaches lead practices on two soccer fields, with kids organized by age. Based on a regimented system, they have children run drills, scrimmage and develop the distinctive Brazilian style of play. These kids have extraordinary talent and flair. But soccer is just a carrot, and we attract these children here to learn about much more than sports. The project uses organized sport as a means to provide structure and personalized supervision by the coaches to help guide vulnerable children toward a safer and more productive direction. Importantly, parents have genuine respect for the coaches, again in part due to their special status as former pro athletes. It also helps that the coaches live in Mangueira and understand the complex dynamics of a neighborhood wracked by poverty and violence. In practical terms, this means they have special access like few others to the daily lives of these children, and they can play an important role in guiding them through a difficult time in their lives.
Coaches can speak to children collectively or individually about their problems, help them make difficult decisions and offer guidance. Since many of the children do not have a positive male figure in the household, coaches often take on the role of dispensing advice ranging from the importance of avoiding a life of crime to improving of focusing on their education. In a community where few organized activities exist for children to learn successful habits, our sports project focuses on key areas beyond physical development.
We concentrate on the mental, social and emotional evolution of the child. More specifically, we aim to help kids learn to follow rules within an organizational environment, respect the direction and decision of legitimate authority figures (coaches and referees, in this instance), develop leadership skills, understand how to work with others, and manage impulses such as anger and frustration.
With practice and improvement, we expect that children will develop these habits and grow in self-confidence and self-pride, understand what it takes to interact in society and within organizations, and ultimately identify what it takes to make a life for themselves. As part of the Mangueira project, children form several soccer teams and compete against clubs from Rio’s more affluent neighborhoods such as Ipanema, offering kids from completely different walks of life an opportunity to come into contact with one another.
In doing so, both sets of kids typically recognize that, after setting aside their initial suspicion, they have much more in common than they do differences. And with the support of this program, our hope is that kids from Mangueira may develop and grow so that in the future they can share more than just a soccer field with their newfound friends.
About Partner
Flamengo is Brazil’s most popular professional soccer team with 36 million supporters across the country. This team of soccer legends such as Zico, Junior, and Romário has a long tradition and historic role in Brazilian popular culture. It is one of only four teams to never be dropped from Brazilian First Division, and since its founding in 1911 Flamengo has won numerous championships.