love.futbol

The global platform of the Elevate Prize offers a great opportunity to gain unique visibility and to leverage the power of football and sports in general to engage communities and sponsors, and expand sustainable and locally relevant programs to new communities. Prior to the pandemic, we were in a growth phase. However, due to health concerns we postponed or canceled 90% of projects and were forced to lay off 60% of staff. The funding of $300,000 would allow us to first increase the capacity of our team that was lost and gets us back on track to begin scaling our impact around the world. 

One specific concept we created is called “Love FC”. Love FC is a network to join together our 50+ communities worldwide to collaborate and share know-how on similar challenges and ideas that they experience. We intend to scale this initiative and believe that the mentoring and cohort provided would be exponential in our ability to meet this goal. The Elevate Prize would put us in a unique position to help bring these players together to create something larger, more impactful, and sustainable than before for our sector and beyond.

In 2006, during a six-month stay in the community of Villa Nueva, Guatemala, Alfredo Axtmayer, and I, love.fútbol's co-founders set a challenge: start a football field project, inviting the local community and all its diverse groups to act as drivers of their own development. The project had the participation of 90% of the local families. Since then, love.fútbol has worked among a variety of audiences, from the highlands in rural Guatemala to some of the most notorious urban favelas in Rio, proving the replicability of our model. Since 2006, local community members across 13 countries and 5 continents have dedicated over 100,000 volunteer hours toward 51 love.fútbol sports space projects where over 68,000 children, youth, and adults play every day.

love.fútbol is a simple idea centered around empowering local community members to provide their kids a safe place to play. We believe this concept is a global one and can create a significant social impact for individuals and entire communities throughout the world. We envision a world where all generations can have access and harness the full potential of sport spaces.

Kids throughout the world lack safe spaces to play and COVID-19 is widening this gap.  According to IBGE (2017), only 27% of the public schools in Brazil have sports infrastructures, and in the US as many as 2/3 of children are without access to a nearby park (The Trust for Public Land). We work to solve these issues in four project phases:

1. The Engagement Phase is when the project becomes more than a pitch, but a community-building experience. love.fútbol identifies the leaders, talents, and local know-how that exist within communities and activates them through the formation of a Local Committee. 

2. The Construction and Inauguration Phases are when ideas are put into practice and the field begins to take form as a symbol of union. love.fútbol provides materials, technical and safety conditions, while local volunteers are engaged in Build Days. On average 2,000 volunteer hours are contributed to each community-driven project.

3. Finally, the Post-Project Phase represents our core objective: that the field serves as a sustainable platform for inclusion. love.fútbol facilitates a transition from the Local Committee to a far-reaching Neighbors’ Network, which together creates field bylaws as well as a tailored sustainability and maintenance plan.

love.futbol addresses a key niche within the Sport for Development sector. We create safe community-driven sports infrastructure (“hardware”) that acts as platforms for organizations around the world that implement educational Sport for Development programs (“software”) that address key local issues such as health, social inclusion, and gender equality. Access to safe, dependable, and quality facilities is a major challenge for Sport for Development organizations around the world, which undermines their programs and decreases their reach.

Our approach creates a precedent of community-driven development through sport. Local stakeholders take ownership over the creation and management of hardware, which can be a dynamic tool for introducing software that is tailored to the local, relevant needs of any community. This hardware and software approach can be used to tackle the most pressing social challenges of any given community and can be replicated worldwide.

love.fútbol collaborates with and enables diverse community leaders to form local committees responsible for the ongoing maintenance and management of their community sports facilities. Through the Elevate Prize, we can replicate this framework and provide the opportunity for the new communities to take ownership of their public spaces as hubs for ongoing social development.

Six months after the inauguration of a field, we carry out an impact assessment using a questionnaire for residents. love.fútbol also holds focus groups with children of the community, separated into different age groups. The aim of these studies is to understand what the facility signifies to each group (children, parents, and educators) and to identify key impacts that result after the inauguration of the project. Additionally, the activation and maintenance of the space are also assessed through quarterly reports from a local maintenance committee. 

The following are examples of metrics to measure our project’s objectives:

Objective 1: Increase the number of youth practicing sports in the community. Metric: survey and focus groups, % of youth who reported playing more sports, particularly among groups that had less access to sport before the project such as girls.

Objective 2: Engage local stakeholders in the planning and construction of community-driven soccer fields. Metrics: number of volunteers; the number of hours of volunteer labor; construction reports.

We are effective because our projects are community-designed and built throughout the entire process which increases the ownership of the projects, helps locals be the protagonists of their success, and lead to a truly sustainable project.