Organizer: Fundació Pare Manel.

Collaborative institution: Ramon Molinas Foundation.

Implementation schedule: 02/01/2014 – 31/12/2014.

The Asociación Deportiva Babar, Futsal to promote social integration

The Asociación Deportiva Babar is a sports club created by the Fundació Pare Manel which participates in the social life of the district of Barcelona Nou Barris. The project is intended to promote the social integration of children and young ones through the practice of Futsal.

The social and educational work of the association has the aim of transforming the environment in which children and young ones of the neighbourhoods of Guineueta, Canyelles, Roquetes, Verdum and Trinitat Nova develop. This objective is achieved through a methodology based on the practice of Futsal and the formation of teams where children and young ones relate to each other and to the trainers and delegates, who stand as educational referents for the participants.

The Asociación Deportiva Babar has 16 teams composed by a total of 184 children and young ones with ages between 6 and 18. Through sports, the participants work on values such as responsibility, respect, friendship or creativity. The project counts on with the work of 37 people, among trainers, delegates, coordinators and collaborators, and is carried out at the Complex Esportiu La Guineueta, at the track of the CEIP Aiguamarina, at the track of the Escola Antaviana, and at the track of the Escola Turó de Roquetes.

The Ramon Molinas Foundation has collaborated with the Babar Sports Association, providing almost one third of the organisation’s annual budget. In this way, the RMF has covered the maintenance costs of all the teams in the association as well as an additional mountaineering activity that the teams from higher categories undertook in the summer.

The practice of Futsal as a tool of personal development

The members of the Asociación Deportiva Babar are children and young ones from the district of Nou Barris who suffer from some type of difficulty or poverty. For this reason the entity takes into account the diversity of the problems of the participants in order to influence on them. Through Futsal, the participants can obtain an optimum personal development, since its practice entails benefits at a psychological and physical level. Also, it meets socializing functions since in the experimentation of sports aspects that favour the exchange of personal relationships can also be appreciated.

On the other hand, sports linked to a club from an environment close to the participants have special significant values for the neighbourhoods with social problems. In the first place, it takes children and young ones to discover an attitude of service as a result of perceiving that their autonomy is conditioned to others. Second, the practice of Futsal propitiates a more personal coexistence, a feature of a collective with high levels of mutual comprehension. Finally, they become aware of the quality of the actions. They get used to deepening with responsibility and maturity in what to do, why, and the consequences of the purpose of doing things right.

Also to mention is that the Asociación Deportiva Babar educates for the equality of people regardless of their gender. In the lower sports categories, the teams of children are mixed. Besides, the association empowers the participation of the family in the social life of the club, in order to create a network of relationships and coexistence among the families, the players, and the technical staff.

The Fundació Pare Manel, an entity committed with social vulnerability

Created in 2004, the Fundació Pare Manel is a non-profit institution located in the district of Nou Barris of Barcelona which develops and leads projects of social and educational action. The entity works with those people in the most vulnerable situation.

The Asociación Deportiva Babar is within the social and educational sports program of the Fundació Pare Manel. Besides the purely sporting activities of the teams from the entity, the program includes a set of actions such as: quarterly meetings of modernization, training and technical talks to the coaches, sports holidays, and tours and excursions to nature.

Outside this area of activity, the Fundació Pare Manel offers a program of comprehensive educational action, a program of school support, a program of educational leisure, a program of integration into the labor market, and a program of accompanying for the prison population.

The Ramon Molinas Foundation, in the framework of the activities of educational leisure, collaborated with the Fundació Pare Manel with the full subsidy of the cost of the Casal Comedor Intercultural in 2013.

The risk of social exclusion, marked in Nou Barris

Nou Barris is one of the districts with the highest risk of social exclusion of Barcelona. According to reports from the City Council of Barcelona, the family income from the neighbourhoods of Roquetes, Verdum, Turó de la Peira or La Guineueta is around 50% of the average of the whole city. These data provide a vision of the socioeconomic characteristics of the families that live in the area. The children and young ones of Nou Barris suffer the consequences directly. For this reason the practice of Futsal is used as a factor for educating and integrating children and young ones ar risk of social exclusion into the society.

Links of interest:

Fundació Pare Manel website.