Mangueira Favela

Background

Mangueira is a favela known throughout Brazil for its famous samba school and as a source of creativity that has helped fuel Rio’s spectacular Carnaval for nearly a century. This is a community full of life and with highly talented people. But it has historically also been a very violent place. Outside Mangueira, 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 provide alternatives by offering programs to foster critical developmental and organizational skills and 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 sponsors a sports academy for 300 children who live in Mangueira. 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, co-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.

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. From my own personal observation, I have to say 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.